September 14, 2025 • 40 mins
An exploration of Bronze Age women. I talk with bestselling author Dr. Emily Hauser about her newest non-fiction book Penelope's Bones and how archaeology and cutting edge science has helped shed new light on the women of the ancient past.
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome back, Meredons to another episode of Greek Mythology Retold Podcasts.
I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with doctor Emily Hauser,
a Yale and Harvard trained classicist and senior lecturer in
Classics and a History at the University of Exeter and
the author of the newly released Penelopees Bones. It is
(00:40):
a powerful nonfiction work that brings women of the Bronze
Age into sharper focus. In each chapter, doctor Hauser weaves
together archaeology, myth and historical research to explore the lives
of mythological women like Andromaica, Penelope Brsais, and of course
(01:00):
my favorite goddess mother, Thetis herself. Today's episode has been
one I have been dying to share with you. We
deep dive into Thetis not just as the mother of Achilles,
but as a divine figure navigating love, grief, and fate
through the lens of motherhood. We talk about everything from
(01:22):
Homer to historical traumas of motherhood and children, to myth
and how it continues to resonate for us today. This
is the kind of conversation that I created this podcast for,
and I'm really thrilled to bring it to you now
before we jump in, I want to add that if
you love mythological fiction the way that I do, or
(01:44):
as much as I do, Doctor Hauser is also the
author of some fiction books, and I will share with
you the ones that I have in my possession. This
one I love. This was my first introduction to her
as an author. This is for the Most Beautiful. This
is a t Ojian war retelling from the from the
perspective of Bresais. So there's this one. She also wrote
(02:07):
for the Winner. This is a retelling of Atalanta. And
there's another one that I don't own, but it's called
for the Immortal. Uh yeah, for the Immortal, and it
is a story about the Amazons. With all that being said,
let's get into it. And here's my conversation with doctor
(02:28):
Emily Heuser.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
All right, are you still there, Yes, I'm still here, Yeah,
right right.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I just want to make sure I didn't do anything funky.
We're talking about Penelopee Bones, the new book by Emily
Doctor Emily Hauser. I was wondering if you could just
tell us how did this book come about.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I mean, there's a lot in that, right, It's yeah,
that's a big question. Yeah, it's no, it's a big question.
But I think in a loss of ways, this book
is quite obvious if you look at kind of where
I've come from. It didn't feel kind of obvious when
I had the idea, but it brings together a lot
of different strands of kind of who I am and
(03:05):
where I've come from, because I have been very lucky
to have had a long, traditional kind of career in
classics and ancient history, and so I've kind of gone
through like the kind of undergraduate training PhD at Yale,
post doc at Harvard. Now I'm an academic in the UK,
and combining that with the fact that I also have
(03:28):
this side in fiction. I've done three novels that retell
the women of Greek myth Oh oh.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yes, yeah, they are oppositely the cameras like I read there.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
But it was really just like those two sides of
me coming together in this book because it was like,
how can we use that those tools that we have
as scholars, as academics, as archeologists and historians to look
at the past, but how can we combine that with
a narrative that doesn't just say, you know, right, this
(04:03):
object was found here and then another one was found here,
But it links them together and it gets at the
people behind the story, and particularly the women behind the story.
That has been an abiding concern for me throughout the
novels and the academic works.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
How do we recover the lost women of history and
of myth?
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And so I felt that bringing those questions together and
actually saying, well, why don't we use the tools of
archaeology and history, but write it in a way that
makes you feel like these are people who are experiencing
the objects that we're talking about, or in some cases
(04:43):
people who these are actually their bones, their teeth that
we're talking about. How can we draw the narrative out
of that and then make us realize that these are
very real women having real experiences. They have a huge
history to tell, and we can weave those together with
everything that we need know about our ancient history, everything
we know about Homer, and it just became this kind
(05:04):
of really holistic story of.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
The women of the ancient world.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Did you did you sit down to write this when
you were writing this book, did you sit down specifically
and say I'm going to do this book or did
it come out of you know, were you doing research
for other projects and then did you you know, like
it's just started building into something and you wait a minute,
I'm you know, I've got this plethora of information, and
(05:30):
did it just kind of organically build or did you
set out to do it on purpose?
Speaker 3 (05:35):
You know, No, I definitely set out to do it
on purpose.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
And that's very much kind of also how I am, Like,
I love kind of to plan, I love to kind
of know where I'm going, So I yeah, I basically
was like, I just had this kind of idea and
I kind of wrote down the first line of the
book and I was like, I can immediately see how
this is going to go now. At that point, what
(06:01):
I had was the idea that the kind of the
bringing together of these different angles the real women behind
Greek myth and that was the kind of Eureka moment.
But what I didn't have was all of the individual
discoveries that I would use, So I then kind of
set about researching them. And one of the things that
(06:21):
was just incredible about writing this book was that everything
just ended up slotting together in ways that I was
finding discoveries for things that I hadn't even known were there,
that were basically kind of speaking to Hermeric characters that
I could never have imagined, you know, so it definitely
I mean, I'm not a superstitious person, but if I
(06:43):
ever believed in the Muses, this was an experience that
would have made me believe in them, because it just
felt like everything just slotted together so seamlessly.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
It was pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
And I have to say that reading the chapters, the
just one rolls into the other and you can just
see this big connection. And I felt like, as somebody
who really likes Greek mythology and the Bronze Age, whether
it's fiction or nonfiction, it's so easy to read and
it's so relatable. And I was wondering, I had a
(07:16):
few chapters. I was wondering if we could talk about
would you mind sharing about Thetis. I that this chapter
really moved me about women's the you said like the
(07:37):
terror of giving birth and that women were as likely
to die in childbirth as men, uh like on the battlefield,
relating those two the harrowing the harrowing experience of childbirth
like wartime, like what men experienced in war, And I
(07:58):
just thought that was brilliant. And the grief I just
and I just love Thetis, So maybe you could share
a little bit about Thetis and what you the the
things that you put together about her and Achilles.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, absolutely, well, I think and it's fun actually that
you picked her out because I think she's one of
the chapters that maybe best exemplifies what I'm trying to
do with Penelope's bones. I'm what the what I hope
that the book does and all of the different angles
that it kind of brings together on women in the
ancient world. So basically we kind of start off by
(08:39):
looking and every single chapter starts off with, first of all,
a kind of very brief, kind of fictional reimagining of
each woman. And for that is she is the mother
of Achilles, that she is an immortal goddess. Of course,
as we all know, Achilles is very much mortal. He
ends up dying because of the kind of fabled arrow
(09:02):
in his achilles heel, which that has tried to protect
him from. Right, So like from the very beginning, she's
got this kind of concern over his mortality. And it's
the kind of ultimate juxtaposition really, because you've got an
immortal goddess and a mortal son.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
She knows he's going.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
To die, and so I just start by kind of
exploring that. We then go into an archaeological dig, and
again every single chapter opens with a dig. This one
is one that was happening not too long ago, in
twenty fourteen in Crete, and it's the discovery of the
grave of a baby boy. And it's what's called an
(09:39):
intramural burial, which means that the baby, the infant, has
been buried under the floor of a home, which is really.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Interesting and really striking.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Because in general, in the ancient world you tend to
see burials happening outside the walls for obvious reasons of
kind of hygiene. But it's particularly in in this period
that start getting this treatment, which to me suggests that
there is something going on, some deep sense of loss,
(10:09):
some desire to keep these little lost babies with the families.
And so I kind of start exploring, well, what is
the evidence for the loss of children in the Late
bronfact which is the period that you know, we would
be sort of if we were looking for a historical
period that Homer's epics were thinking back to, we'd probably
(10:31):
be looking around the Late Bronze Age. And the evidence
kind of as you picked out, is extraordinary. The amount
of young infants, of children, and babies who died early
on in their lives. The numbers are just staggering. In
some cases you get cemeteries that are just filled with
(10:52):
babies and children. In others, we're looking at women who
have died in childbirth. Again, a really shocking outlook for women,
and the kind of average life expectancy for women much
much lower than it is for men in this period,
because we are looking at women dying most likely through childbirth,
men dying about age thirty four, which means that they're
(11:14):
probably dying in war. So it's an incredible kind of
reorientation both of life and of death. It speaks to
what women would have been concerned about, and you can
see that in the kind of religious offerings that they
are giving. But then for me, and this is the
kind of final twist in the tail, it speaks to
the Iliad. So the Iliad is, of course Homer's epic
(11:38):
of war. Traditionally we would sort of refer to it
as the story that tells the wrath of Achilles, and
that's what the epic itself says it's doing. It opens
with Achilles being very peeved and being out of the war,
and he is kind of sulking on the edge of
the battlefield because his glory has been taken away, his
honor has been taken away from him by Agamemnon, the
(12:00):
king of the Greeks. What's fascinating about it, though, is
that as he sort of howls out his rage in
the very first book of the Iliad, he calls for
his mother and the gods. Stetus comes and one of
the first things she says to him is to lament
how short lived he.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Is going to be.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
So whenever she talks to him throughout the Iliad, and
she makes multiple appearances, she is always talking about how
he is faitd to die. We see this again and again.
First of all, in there's a prophecy that she gives
him and that he recounts at one point in the
Iliad where he says that his mother told him that
if he goes home he will have a long life,
but if he stays here and gets glory at Troy,
(12:43):
he is going to die and have a short life.
So she is sort of standing behind that the whole
way through. And what's really interesting is when you reorientate
the poem not to be about the glory and the
honor and the anger of a man, but to be
about the grief of a mother who has to stand
by and watch her son die. It is an extraordinary
(13:06):
upending of the epic. And it was just that moment
where kind of archaeology and myth and epic all come
together to make you just see the past in a
completely different way.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I thought of I think of Thetis, and I think
you make you make reference to this in the chapter
She's gonna She's going to grieve forever. And so when
you have mortal women, you know just the idea. I'm
a I have two kids and I have five grandkids.
So if I just if I thought of anything happening
(13:38):
to any one of them, I feel like I would die.
I don't know if I would. I don't know if
I could breathe anymore. And to have like mothers and
aunts and grandmothers burying children under the floorboards, I can't
(13:59):
imagine what that would feel like. And and I think
you know, like what you're talking about is, you know,
keeping them keeping them close, because when you when you
do lose, when you lose people that you care about,
no matter the age, there is something about hanging on
to the grief because that's all you have left, you know,
(14:21):
and they keep the children close and that thetis she's
so and you mentioned this in the chapter also the
different ways that the myth has her trying to make
him immortal and or and then at the very the
very last, she just tries to hide him away. You know,
(14:43):
she's inna a grief forever.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Absolutely, there'll be no end to that.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And that really, I think speaks to to motherhood and
everything that you laid out in this chapter just really
kind of hit me in the heart on so many levels.
Just that's just that first part of a mother having
to grieve and then I and just the loss of
(15:12):
life and I want to come back to because it
made me. It just made me think right now, like
and then Hecuba had so many.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Children, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And she also perfectly references the grief of a mother
when she asks Hector not to fight Achilles, and she
pulls out her breast and she reminds him breastfeeding. Right,
This incredible moment in this kind of supposed military epic
where a mother reminds her grown son on the battlefield
(15:40):
that in fact, once he was just an infant suckling
at her breast, and and you know, she is appealing
to him there as a mother and in anticipation of
the fact that he is going to die.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
And I and and I think that's so human of
her to do that, because when I look at my
oldest grandson just is fifteen and a half. My next
young my next grand child is a granddaughter. And she
was she had the babysit, and I was like, wait
a minute, how old are you? And she's like, I'm thirteen.
(16:14):
I'm like, wait, in August, you're gonna be fourteen. And
I just you know, you you tend to even when
they're grown. And my grown children are grown, but it's
still in my mind, I see them as young and
I can see how Hecuba would you know, here's this
this grown warrior, you know, a veteran on the battlefield.
(16:38):
And yet I'm sure she looked at him and she
pulls her breast out like remember remember me, remember this,
and that she still sees him as the little boy
that she nursed and took care of. You know, I can't.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
So I think that's also in their reminder because of
course we have seen a little boy earlier on the Iliad,
which is Hector's own son, a Steynaxe, And it's a
reminder that Hecuba in fact, as a mother is quite
lucky that her son has got this far, because of
course Andromikin Hector will lose their son. He gets tossed
(17:14):
off the walls of Troy in one of the kind
of utmost acts of brutality from the Greeks. So, you know,
while there is a pathos to it, there is also
a triumph as a mother to have raised your son
this far, to be the defender of Troy, you know.
So it's a real double edged sword, and it's something
that that is Caese as well, right that you know,
her son, she knows he's fated to die.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
She hates it.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
She knows that actually if he stays in the war
he will he will meet his doom. But she can
see that his glory and for Hector, it's defending Troy.
That's what matters to their sons. And so both of
them in the end do support their sons in doing
what they want to do, even if it ends up
(17:58):
destroying them.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I I even you mentioned how Hector head and I
don't know if it was in this No, it wasn't
in this chapter. Is in the Andromaka chapter. So I'm
kind of chipping ahead. But it's okay. Where when his
mom offers him some wine when he comes off from
from the battlefield and his is asking her to go
make some offerings and prayers to Athena, right, and and
(18:26):
she's offering him the wine. He's like, now, it's gonna
you know, it's gonna mess me up on the fight
when I get out there on the battlefield. And and
I think about even even in that moment, you know,
in the thick of fighting, when he you know, and
he's all, you know, dirty from the war, and and
she still does the mother thing, Are you hungry, here's
(18:48):
something to drink?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
She's she's fully she's just very much a mother. And
I can't imagine what she was going through, you know,
just knowing that every time your son goes leaves the
gates and goes out and fightes, you.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Know, is he coming back?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
You know? Of course Andromaca has that, you know, as
the wife, she has that experience too. But I think
you do it. It's you do such a wonderful job
of showing us what mothers were experiencing in the Bronze
Age in this chapter than.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I mean it was for me, it was kind of
one of the most powerful to write, and also as
a mother myself. But but I think you know, in
the way that it brought together all of those different
experiences that also we don't tend to talk about.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
I mean, it's you know.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
It's we were saying right at the beginning about kind
of how archaeological discoveries can if they're not kind of
fleshed out, if they're not presented in with a kind
of a kind of respect for the fact that these
are real people and real bones and real semmetriies and
real burials. It's very easy to just say like, Okay,
(20:03):
look there are x many burials under the floors, and hey,
look like the measurement of this bone is like why?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
But what does that actually mean?
Speaker 2 (20:12):
And I feel like for me, once I let myself
start telling the story of these women, which is something
that I think we don't do enough, is to color
color that picture in, it started becoming this incredible tragedy.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
You mentioned in here the a couple of things, but
the sippy cups, and since we talked about the breastfeeding
with her keeper that there it was a lot of
babies weren't from the evidence, breastfed maybe past the third month,
(20:50):
and that they they there are a little clay sippy cups.
Could you sort of cold you share that? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I mean, so this is this is one of the
the sort of pieces of evidence that seems to be
coming out of the record, which is that there are
some infant burials where they are being found with either
kind of little versions of ancient Greek sippy cups with
basically like little strainers on the lids, or just sort
of little vessels, and it's possible to trace what those
(21:22):
vessels were holding and using kind of amazing chemical methods,
and what they're discovering is that some of them have
kind of combinations of a sort of honey barley and
sort of opium.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And so it suggests that.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
These young children or infants, who were probably very very unwell,
were being drugged and were being given these kind of
sedatives as a way to alleviate pain. But it's also
interesting in that it demonstrates that they are not exclusively
(22:00):
being breastfeed already at quite an early stage. Now, if
you look at the current who guidelines for breastfeeding.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
It's two years and.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
So you can see that, and you know, you have
to sort of piece together the puzzle to work out
why was it because the infants were unwell and therefore
not feeding well at the breast, which is why they
were being given these other things, which ironically would have
provided them with less of the resistance that breast milk
would have done. Is it that the mothers themselves were malnourished,
(22:34):
which we know again from piecing together the evidence from
both the teeth and the bones, but also from the
written evidence of the time, where we can see that
women systematically are being given less meat than men from
a young age, And therefore is it the mothers who
are malnourished who therefore can't breastfeed to the same length
(22:57):
that they would want to, or is it most likely
a combination of both and the real kind of tragedy
behind this. Aside from obviously the fact that it's not
protecting the infants in the way that they need it
through breast milk, it's also the fact that breast milk
has some contraceptive properties, and if the mothers weren't breastfeeding
(23:19):
for whatever reason, it then meant that they were more
likely to feel pregnant again, which meant that they were
more likely to again initiate this cycle. So it's a
kind of terrifying cycle of tragedies that we're seeing, right.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
And you talked to also about how malnutrition was very
prevalent in the Bronze Age, specifically for women, and that
they had less fat in their diet than the men,
and that it had an effect on the formation of
their pelvic bones and that would make childbirth even more
(23:56):
dangerous for them at the time. Did you want to
can you elaborate on that exactly?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
I mean, it's this issue that you know, if you
have kind of systemic malnutrition of women from a young age,
it means that the body is going to develop in
different ways and in this case, underdevelop if you don't
have enough access to meat and protein and so what
we're seeing in again, and it's particularly in association with
(24:26):
these kinds of worst case cemeteries where we see lots
and lots of infant and child burials. You see the
women's skeletons displaying a significantly narrowed birth canal, probably due
to this lifelong malnutrition, which is probably connected to the
numbers of infant deaths that we're seeing in that, you know.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
The women's bodies weren't properly prepared for childbirth.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
They are trying to give birth with a significantly narrower
birth canal, which obviously makes it a lot harder. And
then we've got all of these other issues around. You know,
if you're malnourished, you're also more likely to be prone
to diseases and so on. Those could then be passed
on to the infants, either in utero or when they're born.
(25:14):
And yeah, we just got this kind of real difficult
situation for women. And that just makes this sound like
an altogether terrifying prospect.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
What was the average age when women would be married
and like have their first children.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
We don't know about marriage, but in terms of the
first child you can see that in the Moutrue record,
and I believe it's nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Okay, we're and we're not. I'm just trying to think
of what the average age is like in the United
States or in the UK.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Do you know what, I don't actually know the modern figures.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
I think what is perhaps more striking is not the
average age, which which kind of on the face of
it is okay, but it's below the optimal age of childbearing,
is the first thing to say. And the second thing
to say is that the mortality rate is really quite
low for women. And I can't remember exactly where it is.
(26:16):
I think it was maybe twenty four to twenty five.
I don't have the figures. I remember it was thirty
four for men. It's somewhere in the twenties for women
young exactly. So it's not long after you've had your
first child that you are going to then be likely
also to die.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
When I think about all the how many women have
a c section in our modern society, we have that
as an option when a child is not fitting through
the pulvis, and I can just imagine, like how often
that must have happened in the Bronze Age, because they
didn't there's no way to remedy that.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
They have a specific goddess who I talk about in
the book called Ilethuia, who is the goddess of birth pains,
labor pains, right, And it seems very specific to have
a goddess not just of childbirth, which is like hero,
but a specific goddess of birth pains. And it shows
(27:15):
it shows that this was this was a real something
that people would have been aware of. It's something that
women would have worshiped her. They would have prayed for
a safe delivery, for a good delivery. And again going
back to that comparison to war, it was one of
these moments of incredible kind of synergy where you know,
I came across this simile in the Iliad, and Homer's poetry,
(27:38):
of course, is famous for these incredible similes that move
you from the world of war into the world of
peace or farming or whatever it is. And this one
is an open ripping wound on the battlefield suffered by Agamemnon,
king of the Greeks. I mean, it doesn't get much
more masculine than that. And it is compared to the
(28:00):
pains of labor when Alithuia comes.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
So an incredible.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Comparison between a mortal wound in battle and the kind
of biggest killer of children of women.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
There. I made a note that that Penelope, you know,
having with odyssis been gone for twenty years. That kind
of saved her from she wasn't gonna have to experience,
you know, dying from childbirth. I just made a note
(28:33):
that that kind of in a way saved her.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Yeah, it's an importing point.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Although we don't see if you look at the kind
of families of the heroes of Greek myth, we don't
see kind of huge families. Whether that is a kind
of testament to the fact that you know there were deaths,
I don't know. But then of course, like you don't
also know exactly what was going on in Ehaca like
(29:00):
I would, just because the disease is away. She's got
all of these suitors and they have very specific ideas,
so like and Homer is very kind of keeping it
close to the chest about what exactly happened between Penelope
and the suitors.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
So right, yeah, you did. You mentioned that in your
Penelope chapter. This also made me think about in the
Middle Ages, how you they didn't name the child until
the first year. I'm just did they have any tradition
like they did they not name children, and we know
that from the Middle Ages, where that was a big deal.
I remember being in graduate school and learning that they
(29:39):
would wrap babies up in swaddling cloth and then hang
them from a peg on the wall and to keep
rats from and I was like, oh my gosh, I
was so mortified to learn that. And but then they
didn't name. They didn't give them a name, and that's
I think that's where we get that tradition of the
you know, the first birthday, it's a big deal, and
that's when they would get a name. Did they have
(30:00):
any traditions like that or.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
So in this period, It's it's really hard to know
because the written records, which would be the only place
where we would really see a record or something like that,
they are these bureaucratic lists from the Maicenean palaces. They're
not giving us any kind of local customs. Once we
get later on into kind of classical Greece, we do
get kind of naming practices and naming rituals, but you know,
(30:28):
that's like hundreds of years later, so I'm not sure
we could sort of push anything back into this period.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, there's a great picture in her book. I'll have
to This is like if you can see that everybody
is like the little sippy cup that we were talking
about earlier.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Not one sopsional, because that one was found in a
house of potters. So they actually made this cup themselves,
and so there is just like an extra layer as
well that you know, they made this for this little
infant who never made it beyond kind of the beginnings
of their life.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
And also that it is obviously.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Symbolic of the fact that this little person would never
grow up to be a potter like they were. So
there's a real there's a real pathos and tragedy to
that gift.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yes, I wanted to go back to I don't know
why this is now popping into my to my head.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
But.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Did you did you watch that the Netflix show Troy
Follow the City?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Did you? I that was kind of my first introduction
to scene that Odysseus and Penelope. They showed three children.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Do you remember that? I don't.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Do you know what it's ages since I saw it
and I don't remember that at all. All I remember
really was was Helen of Troy.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah, I don't. I don't remember the Odysseus, Penlopy.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Penelope had a baby and then he was taught and
Telemachus was like five, and I was that I was
kind of I'm just going back to your comment you
had said earlier about the heroes had like small families. Yea,
so I have not explored that, so that that just
made me think of that. Was there anything else that
you wanted to like bring up or say about Thetis
(32:17):
and Achilles. You say thetis, I say thetis.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
So like American and English pronunciations, particularly on classical words,
is notorious. The Yeah, it's it's you can completely say
it however you want. It's it's difficult because, like there
is a letter in the Greek alphabet which is the eater,
which in Americans will tend to pronounce as an e
as a long e, and Brits will tend to say air,
(32:43):
whereas that the in thetus is a short in the Greek.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
So like, yeah, but it's like, really, it's up for grabs.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I'm like, oh my gosh, I didn't say it wrong anyway,
but that makes sense. Was there anything that you that
we did not cover about.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
I mean, I guess one of just one of my
kind of my favorite things about her that I kind
of discovered as I was as I was doing this
was that, you know, I knew that she talks a
lot about having given birth to Achilles and the fact
that he's going to.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Die, and all of that is interesting in and of
itself in imagining an immortal goddess giving birth.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
That is an interesting kind of proposition.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
But she also, in the Greek comes up with a
very specific word for this, which is what Homeric scholars
call a hapax logomenon, which means are once spoken, And
that means that it is a word that only occurs
this time in the entire corpus of ancient.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Greek literature that we have wow, which.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Is very very cool. It also means that it is
a very unusual word. It means that it is possibly
one that wasn't maybe even in currency, and it's one
that the poet kind of put together to express how
Thetis was feeling and how unusual she was.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
And the word in Greek is do.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Aristo yeah, which means the worst and the best childbirtha.
And it's all one word, and basically you've got the
kind of the negative adjective, the positive adjective, and then
you've got to kea at the end, which means mother,
but it literally it means a child birtha in the feminine.
(34:34):
And I just think that that's so fascinating as a
way to try and articulate how she loves being his mom.
She you know, feels so fortunate to have given birth
to him, but she also knows that it is the
worst thing that she's going to experience, right, And I
feel like that's kind of for me as a mom,
(34:55):
I can really associate with that in that like the
highs are the highest you will ever have, the loads
are low, but it's because.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
It's because you care so much.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
And I just that word that's really like kind of
stayed with me because I think it's just it's such
a brilliant articulation of motherhood.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I love that, and I think that does encapitulate about
being a mother. So all of the things that that
she experienced and all the things she knows she's going
to experience. Sort of I'm not even sure what that
would be be. Like, the only thing I can think
(35:37):
about would be when my father had cancer, you know,
and knowing that that death was eminent, we just didn't
know when. But living with living with that, you know,
it became like every phone call and you know, like
is this it?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I think Thetis must have been going through that that
she she knew it was going to that his end
was going to come quickly at some point, but she
didn't know exactly when.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Which is so hard I'm not going to say it's worse,
but it's but it's really hard.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
It's an anticipation of It's like that feeling of impending
doom that you can't get away from, and then knowing
that that the doom is associated with your child. I
don't know, like how you you know, you move past that.
I do find it interesting that as a goddess she
(36:33):
was not that she was not spared birth in pain.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
A really interesting example of that, which I think I
talk about in the chapter, which is it's not in Homer,
but it's in a hymn that was ascribed in antiquity
to Homer, so they're called the Hameric hymns. Probably not
by the same poet as the Iliad, if the Iliad
was indeed by one poet at all. But there is
(36:59):
one which is the Hemeric Hymn to Apollo, and it
details Apollo's birth, and from his side of it, it's brilliant.
It's like a very divine birth in that he pops
out and he jumps straight up and he's already walking
and like, but from the woman's side, from Rito, who's
his mother for her, it's insanely difficult because Hero who
(37:21):
is jealous of her basically gets Illithuia, the goddess of birth,
pains and holds her back so Lito can't give birth.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
And you know, so she's really kind of.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Straining and trying, and eventually she kind of finds a
place where she can do it, and she sits down
at the base of a tree and she finally gives birth.
But it's this extraordinary example of like prolonged labor, and
it's a goddess. So yeah, I think I think the
goddesses don't get a good time of it, even if
Apollo pops out and has a has a great birth and.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
The only one, I guess. And you know that that's
not fair because Athena pops out of Zeus's head, right.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Us, Yeah, and so have labor paints.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Well, he has his head off with an axe and
that's got to hurt a little bit, hasn't it?
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Call it a rap on this one?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Well, it will be nice to come back and talk
about women of the odysty. But yeah, I mean it's
I'm really glad you picked out that is because like
all the Iliad women, she's your favorite.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
I remember, you know, just thinking that just a lot
of the research that I had done. I just really
thought how she encap encapsulates the the grief of motherhood,
and you know, and I kind of lean to like
the tragic stuff because that's you know, I mean, there's
(38:49):
the joy is stuff, but it's the joy comes only
when you when you have the the opposite grieving forever.
It reminds me of our and Lord of the Rings,
and so we have these little glimpses of that mother's
and mother's grief and you know, parent grief of losing
(39:10):
a child is I think it's probably the worst, you know.
I So anyway, Thetis is kind of my favorite.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, oh well yeah, really really glad, but you know,
it was, it was really fun.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
That's it for today's episode, Murmeredawn's a huge thank you
to doctor Emily Hauser for joining me and sharing her
incredible insight into the life and legacy of Thetis and
how archaeology and science have shed light on one of
the most complex and compelling goddess mothers in Greek mythology.
If today's conversation sparks something in new I highly recommend
(39:47):
her new book, Penelope's Bones. It is a brilliant fusion
of archaeology and myth and historical imagination that brings Bronze
Age women into the spotlight where they belong. And speaking
of Penelope, don't miss our next episode where Doctor Houser
will be back to talk about the Queen of Ithaca herself,
(40:09):
the wife, the weaver, survivor and the strategist. Until then,
thank you for listening and watching, and as always, drink
your wine and be merry. Mrmadon's
Welcome back, Meredons to another episode of Greek Mythology Retold Podcasts.
I had the absolute pleasure of speaking with doctor Emily Hauser,
a Yale and Harvard trained classicist and senior lecturer in
Classics and a History at the University of Exeter and
the author of the newly released Penelopees Bones. It is
(00:40):
a powerful nonfiction work that brings women of the Bronze
Age into sharper focus. In each chapter, doctor Hauser weaves
together archaeology, myth and historical research to explore the lives
of mythological women like Andromaica, Penelope Brsais, and of course
(01:00):
my favorite goddess mother, Thetis herself. Today's episode has been
one I have been dying to share with you. We
deep dive into Thetis not just as the mother of Achilles,
but as a divine figure navigating love, grief, and fate
through the lens of motherhood. We talk about everything from
(01:22):
Homer to historical traumas of motherhood and children, to myth
and how it continues to resonate for us today. This
is the kind of conversation that I created this podcast for,
and I'm really thrilled to bring it to you now
before we jump in, I want to add that if
you love mythological fiction the way that I do, or
(01:44):
as much as I do, Doctor Hauser is also the
author of some fiction books, and I will share with
you the ones that I have in my possession. This
one I love. This was my first introduction to her
as an author. This is for the Most Beautiful. This
is a t Ojian war retelling from the from the
perspective of Bresais. So there's this one. She also wrote
(02:07):
for the Winner. This is a retelling of Atalanta. And
there's another one that I don't own, but it's called
for the Immortal. Uh yeah, for the Immortal, and it
is a story about the Amazons. With all that being said,
let's get into it. And here's my conversation with doctor
(02:28):
Emily Heuser.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
All right, are you still there, Yes, I'm still here, Yeah,
right right.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
I just want to make sure I didn't do anything funky.
We're talking about Penelopee Bones, the new book by Emily
Doctor Emily Hauser. I was wondering if you could just
tell us how did this book come about.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
I mean, there's a lot in that, right, It's yeah,
that's a big question. Yeah, it's no, it's a big question.
But I think in a loss of ways, this book
is quite obvious if you look at kind of where
I've come from. It didn't feel kind of obvious when
I had the idea, but it brings together a lot
of different strands of kind of who I am and
(03:05):
where I've come from, because I have been very lucky
to have had a long, traditional kind of career in
classics and ancient history, and so I've kind of gone
through like the kind of undergraduate training PhD at Yale,
post doc at Harvard. Now I'm an academic in the UK,
and combining that with the fact that I also have
(03:28):
this side in fiction. I've done three novels that retell
the women of Greek myth Oh oh.
Speaker 1 (03:34):
Yes, yeah, they are oppositely the cameras like I read there.
Speaker 2 (03:41):
But it was really just like those two sides of
me coming together in this book because it was like,
how can we use that those tools that we have
as scholars, as academics, as archeologists and historians to look
at the past, but how can we combine that with
a narrative that doesn't just say, you know, right, this
(04:03):
object was found here and then another one was found here,
But it links them together and it gets at the
people behind the story, and particularly the women behind the story.
That has been an abiding concern for me throughout the
novels and the academic works.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
How do we recover the lost women of history and
of myth?
Speaker 2 (04:22):
And so I felt that bringing those questions together and
actually saying, well, why don't we use the tools of
archaeology and history, but write it in a way that
makes you feel like these are people who are experiencing
the objects that we're talking about, or in some cases
(04:43):
people who these are actually their bones, their teeth that
we're talking about. How can we draw the narrative out
of that and then make us realize that these are
very real women having real experiences. They have a huge
history to tell, and we can weave those together with
everything that we need know about our ancient history, everything
we know about Homer, and it just became this kind
(05:04):
of really holistic story of.
Speaker 3 (05:06):
The women of the ancient world.
Speaker 1 (05:08):
Did you did you sit down to write this when
you were writing this book, did you sit down specifically
and say I'm going to do this book or did
it come out of you know, were you doing research
for other projects and then did you you know, like
it's just started building into something and you wait a minute,
I'm you know, I've got this plethora of information, and
(05:30):
did it just kind of organically build or did you
set out to do it on purpose?
Speaker 3 (05:35):
You know, No, I definitely set out to do it
on purpose.
Speaker 2 (05:39):
And that's very much kind of also how I am, Like,
I love kind of to plan, I love to kind
of know where I'm going, So I yeah, I basically
was like, I just had this kind of idea and
I kind of wrote down the first line of the
book and I was like, I can immediately see how
this is going to go now. At that point, what
(06:01):
I had was the idea that the kind of the
bringing together of these different angles the real women behind
Greek myth and that was the kind of Eureka moment.
But what I didn't have was all of the individual
discoveries that I would use, So I then kind of
set about researching them. And one of the things that
(06:21):
was just incredible about writing this book was that everything
just ended up slotting together in ways that I was
finding discoveries for things that I hadn't even known were there,
that were basically kind of speaking to Hermeric characters that
I could never have imagined, you know, so it definitely
I mean, I'm not a superstitious person, but if I
(06:43):
ever believed in the Muses, this was an experience that
would have made me believe in them, because it just
felt like everything just slotted together so seamlessly.
Speaker 3 (06:51):
It was pretty amazing.
Speaker 1 (06:53):
And I have to say that reading the chapters, the
just one rolls into the other and you can just
see this big connection. And I felt like, as somebody
who really likes Greek mythology and the Bronze Age, whether
it's fiction or nonfiction, it's so easy to read and
it's so relatable. And I was wondering, I had a
(07:16):
few chapters. I was wondering if we could talk about
would you mind sharing about Thetis. I that this chapter
really moved me about women's the you said like the
(07:37):
terror of giving birth and that women were as likely
to die in childbirth as men, uh like on the battlefield,
relating those two the harrowing the harrowing experience of childbirth
like wartime, like what men experienced in war, And I
(07:58):
just thought that was brilliant. And the grief I just
and I just love Thetis, So maybe you could share
a little bit about Thetis and what you the the
things that you put together about her and Achilles.
Speaker 2 (08:15):
Yeah, absolutely, well, I think and it's fun actually that
you picked her out because I think she's one of
the chapters that maybe best exemplifies what I'm trying to
do with Penelope's bones. I'm what the what I hope
that the book does and all of the different angles
that it kind of brings together on women in the
ancient world. So basically we kind of start off by
(08:39):
looking and every single chapter starts off with, first of all,
a kind of very brief, kind of fictional reimagining of
each woman. And for that is she is the mother
of Achilles, that she is an immortal goddess. Of course,
as we all know, Achilles is very much mortal. He
ends up dying because of the kind of fabled arrow
(09:02):
in his achilles heel, which that has tried to protect
him from. Right, So like from the very beginning, she's
got this kind of concern over his mortality. And it's
the kind of ultimate juxtaposition really, because you've got an
immortal goddess and a mortal son.
Speaker 3 (09:17):
She knows he's going.
Speaker 2 (09:18):
To die, and so I just start by kind of
exploring that. We then go into an archaeological dig, and
again every single chapter opens with a dig. This one
is one that was happening not too long ago, in
twenty fourteen in Crete, and it's the discovery of the
grave of a baby boy. And it's what's called an
(09:39):
intramural burial, which means that the baby, the infant, has
been buried under the floor of a home, which is really.
Speaker 3 (09:47):
Interesting and really striking.
Speaker 2 (09:48):
Because in general, in the ancient world you tend to
see burials happening outside the walls for obvious reasons of
kind of hygiene. But it's particularly in in this period
that start getting this treatment, which to me suggests that
there is something going on, some deep sense of loss,
(10:09):
some desire to keep these little lost babies with the families.
And so I kind of start exploring, well, what is
the evidence for the loss of children in the Late
bronfact which is the period that you know, we would
be sort of if we were looking for a historical
period that Homer's epics were thinking back to, we'd probably
(10:31):
be looking around the Late Bronze Age. And the evidence
kind of as you picked out, is extraordinary. The amount
of young infants, of children, and babies who died early
on in their lives. The numbers are just staggering. In
some cases you get cemeteries that are just filled with
(10:52):
babies and children. In others, we're looking at women who
have died in childbirth. Again, a really shocking outlook for women,
and the kind of average life expectancy for women much
much lower than it is for men in this period,
because we are looking at women dying most likely through childbirth,
men dying about age thirty four, which means that they're
(11:14):
probably dying in war. So it's an incredible kind of
reorientation both of life and of death. It speaks to
what women would have been concerned about, and you can
see that in the kind of religious offerings that they
are giving. But then for me, and this is the
kind of final twist in the tail, it speaks to
the Iliad. So the Iliad is, of course Homer's epic
(11:38):
of war. Traditionally we would sort of refer to it
as the story that tells the wrath of Achilles, and
that's what the epic itself says it's doing. It opens
with Achilles being very peeved and being out of the war,
and he is kind of sulking on the edge of
the battlefield because his glory has been taken away, his
honor has been taken away from him by Agamemnon, the
(12:00):
king of the Greeks. What's fascinating about it, though, is
that as he sort of howls out his rage in
the very first book of the Iliad, he calls for
his mother and the gods. Stetus comes and one of
the first things she says to him is to lament
how short lived he.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Is going to be.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
So whenever she talks to him throughout the Iliad, and
she makes multiple appearances, she is always talking about how
he is faitd to die. We see this again and again.
First of all, in there's a prophecy that she gives
him and that he recounts at one point in the
Iliad where he says that his mother told him that
if he goes home he will have a long life,
but if he stays here and gets glory at Troy,
(12:43):
he is going to die and have a short life.
So she is sort of standing behind that the whole
way through. And what's really interesting is when you reorientate
the poem not to be about the glory and the
honor and the anger of a man, but to be
about the grief of a mother who has to stand
by and watch her son die. It is an extraordinary
(13:06):
upending of the epic. And it was just that moment
where kind of archaeology and myth and epic all come
together to make you just see the past in a
completely different way.
Speaker 1 (13:17):
I thought of I think of Thetis, and I think
you make you make reference to this in the chapter
She's gonna She's going to grieve forever. And so when
you have mortal women, you know just the idea. I'm
a I have two kids and I have five grandkids.
So if I just if I thought of anything happening
(13:38):
to any one of them, I feel like I would die.
I don't know if I would. I don't know if
I could breathe anymore. And to have like mothers and
aunts and grandmothers burying children under the floorboards, I can't
(13:59):
imagine what that would feel like. And and I think
you know, like what you're talking about is, you know,
keeping them keeping them close, because when you when you
do lose, when you lose people that you care about,
no matter the age, there is something about hanging on
to the grief because that's all you have left, you know,
(14:21):
and they keep the children close and that thetis she's
so and you mentioned this in the chapter also the
different ways that the myth has her trying to make
him immortal and or and then at the very the
very last, she just tries to hide him away. You know,
(14:43):
she's inna a grief forever.
Speaker 3 (14:46):
Absolutely, there'll be no end to that.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
And that really, I think speaks to to motherhood and
everything that you laid out in this chapter just really
kind of hit me in the heart on so many levels.
Just that's just that first part of a mother having
to grieve and then I and just the loss of
(15:12):
life and I want to come back to because it
made me. It just made me think right now, like
and then Hecuba had so many.
Speaker 3 (15:17):
Children, Yeah, exactly.
Speaker 2 (15:19):
And she also perfectly references the grief of a mother
when she asks Hector not to fight Achilles, and she
pulls out her breast and she reminds him breastfeeding. Right,
This incredible moment in this kind of supposed military epic
where a mother reminds her grown son on the battlefield
(15:40):
that in fact, once he was just an infant suckling
at her breast, and and you know, she is appealing
to him there as a mother and in anticipation of
the fact that he is going to die.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
And I and and I think that's so human of
her to do that, because when I look at my
oldest grandson just is fifteen and a half. My next
young my next grand child is a granddaughter. And she
was she had the babysit, and I was like, wait
a minute, how old are you? And she's like, I'm thirteen.
(16:14):
I'm like, wait, in August, you're gonna be fourteen. And
I just you know, you you tend to even when
they're grown. And my grown children are grown, but it's
still in my mind, I see them as young and
I can see how Hecuba would you know, here's this
this grown warrior, you know, a veteran on the battlefield.
(16:38):
And yet I'm sure she looked at him and she
pulls her breast out like remember remember me, remember this,
and that she still sees him as the little boy
that she nursed and took care of. You know, I can't.
Speaker 2 (16:53):
So I think that's also in their reminder because of
course we have seen a little boy earlier on the Iliad,
which is Hector's own son, a Steynaxe, And it's a
reminder that Hecuba in fact, as a mother is quite
lucky that her son has got this far, because of
course Andromikin Hector will lose their son. He gets tossed
(17:14):
off the walls of Troy in one of the kind
of utmost acts of brutality from the Greeks. So, you know,
while there is a pathos to it, there is also
a triumph as a mother to have raised your son
this far, to be the defender of Troy, you know.
So it's a real double edged sword, and it's something
that that is Caese as well, right that you know,
her son, she knows he's fated to die.
Speaker 3 (17:37):
She hates it.
Speaker 2 (17:37):
She knows that actually if he stays in the war
he will he will meet his doom. But she can
see that his glory and for Hector, it's defending Troy.
That's what matters to their sons. And so both of
them in the end do support their sons in doing
what they want to do, even if it ends up
(17:58):
destroying them.
Speaker 1 (18:00):
I I even you mentioned how Hector head and I
don't know if it was in this No, it wasn't
in this chapter. Is in the Andromaka chapter. So I'm
kind of chipping ahead. But it's okay. Where when his
mom offers him some wine when he comes off from
from the battlefield and his is asking her to go
make some offerings and prayers to Athena, right, and and
(18:26):
she's offering him the wine. He's like, now, it's gonna
you know, it's gonna mess me up on the fight
when I get out there on the battlefield. And and
I think about even even in that moment, you know,
in the thick of fighting, when he you know, and
he's all, you know, dirty from the war, and and
she still does the mother thing, Are you hungry, here's
(18:48):
something to drink?
Speaker 2 (18:49):
You know.
Speaker 1 (18:49):
She's she's fully she's just very much a mother. And
I can't imagine what she was going through, you know,
just knowing that every time your son goes leaves the
gates and goes out and fightes, you.
Speaker 3 (19:04):
Know, is he coming back?
Speaker 1 (19:06):
You know? Of course Andromaca has that, you know, as
the wife, she has that experience too. But I think
you do it. It's you do such a wonderful job
of showing us what mothers were experiencing in the Bronze
Age in this chapter than.
Speaker 2 (19:24):
I mean it was for me, it was kind of
one of the most powerful to write, and also as
a mother myself. But but I think you know, in
the way that it brought together all of those different
experiences that also we don't tend to talk about.
Speaker 3 (19:39):
I mean, it's you know.
Speaker 2 (19:40):
It's we were saying right at the beginning about kind
of how archaeological discoveries can if they're not kind of
fleshed out, if they're not presented in with a kind
of a kind of respect for the fact that these
are real people and real bones and real semmetriies and
real burials. It's very easy to just say like, Okay,
(20:03):
look there are x many burials under the floors, and hey,
look like the measurement of this bone is like why?
Speaker 3 (20:10):
But what does that actually mean?
Speaker 2 (20:12):
And I feel like for me, once I let myself
start telling the story of these women, which is something
that I think we don't do enough, is to color
color that picture in, it started becoming this incredible tragedy.
Speaker 1 (20:27):
You mentioned in here the a couple of things, but
the sippy cups, and since we talked about the breastfeeding
with her keeper that there it was a lot of
babies weren't from the evidence, breastfed maybe past the third month,
(20:50):
and that they they there are a little clay sippy cups.
Could you sort of cold you share that? Yeah?
Speaker 2 (20:58):
I mean, so this is this is one of the
the sort of pieces of evidence that seems to be
coming out of the record, which is that there are
some infant burials where they are being found with either
kind of little versions of ancient Greek sippy cups with
basically like little strainers on the lids, or just sort
of little vessels, and it's possible to trace what those
(21:22):
vessels were holding and using kind of amazing chemical methods,
and what they're discovering is that some of them have
kind of combinations of a sort of honey barley and
sort of opium.
Speaker 3 (21:37):
And so it suggests that.
Speaker 2 (21:39):
These young children or infants, who were probably very very unwell,
were being drugged and were being given these kind of
sedatives as a way to alleviate pain. But it's also
interesting in that it demonstrates that they are not exclusively
(22:00):
being breastfeed already at quite an early stage. Now, if
you look at the current who guidelines for breastfeeding.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
It's two years and.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
So you can see that, and you know, you have
to sort of piece together the puzzle to work out
why was it because the infants were unwell and therefore
not feeding well at the breast, which is why they
were being given these other things, which ironically would have
provided them with less of the resistance that breast milk
would have done. Is it that the mothers themselves were malnourished,
(22:34):
which we know again from piecing together the evidence from
both the teeth and the bones, but also from the
written evidence of the time, where we can see that
women systematically are being given less meat than men from
a young age, And therefore is it the mothers who
are malnourished who therefore can't breastfeed to the same length
(22:57):
that they would want to, or is it most likely
a combination of both and the real kind of tragedy
behind this. Aside from obviously the fact that it's not
protecting the infants in the way that they need it
through breast milk, it's also the fact that breast milk
has some contraceptive properties, and if the mothers weren't breastfeeding
(23:19):
for whatever reason, it then meant that they were more
likely to feel pregnant again, which meant that they were
more likely to again initiate this cycle. So it's a
kind of terrifying cycle of tragedies that we're seeing, right.
Speaker 1 (23:31):
And you talked to also about how malnutrition was very
prevalent in the Bronze Age, specifically for women, and that
they had less fat in their diet than the men,
and that it had an effect on the formation of
their pelvic bones and that would make childbirth even more
(23:56):
dangerous for them at the time. Did you want to
can you elaborate on that exactly?
Speaker 2 (24:02):
I mean, it's this issue that you know, if you
have kind of systemic malnutrition of women from a young age,
it means that the body is going to develop in
different ways and in this case, underdevelop if you don't
have enough access to meat and protein and so what
we're seeing in again, and it's particularly in association with
(24:26):
these kinds of worst case cemeteries where we see lots
and lots of infant and child burials. You see the
women's skeletons displaying a significantly narrowed birth canal, probably due
to this lifelong malnutrition, which is probably connected to the
numbers of infant deaths that we're seeing in that, you know.
Speaker 3 (24:49):
The women's bodies weren't properly prepared for childbirth.
Speaker 2 (24:53):
They are trying to give birth with a significantly narrower
birth canal, which obviously makes it a lot harder. And
then we've got all of these other issues around. You know,
if you're malnourished, you're also more likely to be prone
to diseases and so on. Those could then be passed
on to the infants, either in utero or when they're born.
(25:14):
And yeah, we just got this kind of real difficult
situation for women. And that just makes this sound like
an altogether terrifying prospect.
Speaker 1 (25:23):
What was the average age when women would be married
and like have their first children.
Speaker 2 (25:32):
We don't know about marriage, but in terms of the
first child you can see that in the Moutrue record,
and I believe it's nineteen nineteen.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Okay, we're and we're not. I'm just trying to think
of what the average age is like in the United
States or in the UK.
Speaker 3 (25:48):
Do you know what, I don't actually know the modern figures.
Speaker 2 (25:55):
I think what is perhaps more striking is not the
average age, which which kind of on the face of
it is okay, but it's below the optimal age of childbearing,
is the first thing to say. And the second thing
to say is that the mortality rate is really quite
low for women. And I can't remember exactly where it is.
(26:16):
I think it was maybe twenty four to twenty five.
I don't have the figures. I remember it was thirty
four for men. It's somewhere in the twenties for women
young exactly. So it's not long after you've had your
first child that you are going to then be likely
also to die.
Speaker 1 (26:34):
When I think about all the how many women have
a c section in our modern society, we have that
as an option when a child is not fitting through
the pulvis, and I can just imagine, like how often
that must have happened in the Bronze Age, because they
didn't there's no way to remedy that.
Speaker 2 (26:54):
They have a specific goddess who I talk about in
the book called Ilethuia, who is the goddess of birth pains,
labor pains, right, And it seems very specific to have
a goddess not just of childbirth, which is like hero,
but a specific goddess of birth pains. And it shows
(27:15):
it shows that this was this was a real something
that people would have been aware of. It's something that
women would have worshiped her. They would have prayed for
a safe delivery, for a good delivery. And again going
back to that comparison to war, it was one of
these moments of incredible kind of synergy where you know,
I came across this simile in the Iliad, and Homer's poetry,
(27:38):
of course, is famous for these incredible similes that move
you from the world of war into the world of
peace or farming or whatever it is. And this one
is an open ripping wound on the battlefield suffered by Agamemnon,
king of the Greeks. I mean, it doesn't get much
more masculine than that. And it is compared to the
(28:00):
pains of labor when Alithuia comes.
Speaker 3 (28:03):
So an incredible.
Speaker 2 (28:05):
Comparison between a mortal wound in battle and the kind
of biggest killer of children of women.
Speaker 1 (28:12):
There. I made a note that that Penelope, you know,
having with odyssis been gone for twenty years. That kind
of saved her from she wasn't gonna have to experience,
you know, dying from childbirth. I just made a note
(28:33):
that that kind of in a way saved her.
Speaker 3 (28:35):
Yeah, it's an importing point.
Speaker 2 (28:37):
Although we don't see if you look at the kind
of families of the heroes of Greek myth, we don't
see kind of huge families. Whether that is a kind
of testament to the fact that you know there were deaths,
I don't know. But then of course, like you don't
also know exactly what was going on in Ehaca like
(29:00):
I would, just because the disease is away. She's got
all of these suitors and they have very specific ideas,
so like and Homer is very kind of keeping it
close to the chest about what exactly happened between Penelope
and the suitors.
Speaker 1 (29:15):
So right, yeah, you did. You mentioned that in your
Penelope chapter. This also made me think about in the
Middle Ages, how you they didn't name the child until
the first year. I'm just did they have any tradition
like they did they not name children, and we know
that from the Middle Ages, where that was a big deal.
I remember being in graduate school and learning that they
(29:39):
would wrap babies up in swaddling cloth and then hang
them from a peg on the wall and to keep
rats from and I was like, oh my gosh, I
was so mortified to learn that. And but then they
didn't name. They didn't give them a name, and that's
I think that's where we get that tradition of the
you know, the first birthday, it's a big deal, and
that's when they would get a name. Did they have
(30:00):
any traditions like that or.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
So in this period, It's it's really hard to know
because the written records, which would be the only place
where we would really see a record or something like that,
they are these bureaucratic lists from the Maicenean palaces. They're
not giving us any kind of local customs. Once we
get later on into kind of classical Greece, we do
get kind of naming practices and naming rituals, but you know,
(30:28):
that's like hundreds of years later, so I'm not sure
we could sort of push anything back into this period.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Yeah, there's a great picture in her book. I'll have
to This is like if you can see that everybody
is like the little sippy cup that we were talking
about earlier.
Speaker 2 (30:46):
Not one sopsional, because that one was found in a
house of potters. So they actually made this cup themselves,
and so there is just like an extra layer as
well that you know, they made this for this little
infant who never made it beyond kind of the beginnings
of their life.
Speaker 3 (31:06):
And also that it is obviously.
Speaker 2 (31:08):
Symbolic of the fact that this little person would never
grow up to be a potter like they were. So
there's a real there's a real pathos and tragedy to
that gift.
Speaker 1 (31:17):
Yes, I wanted to go back to I don't know
why this is now popping into my to my head.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
But.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Did you did you watch that the Netflix show Troy
Follow the City?
Speaker 3 (31:31):
Yes?
Speaker 1 (31:32):
Did you? I that was kind of my first introduction
to scene that Odysseus and Penelope. They showed three children.
Speaker 3 (31:41):
Do you remember that? I don't.
Speaker 2 (31:43):
Do you know what it's ages since I saw it
and I don't remember that at all. All I remember
really was was Helen of Troy.
Speaker 3 (31:50):
Yeah, I don't. I don't remember the Odysseus, Penlopy.
Speaker 1 (31:53):
Penelope had a baby and then he was taught and
Telemachus was like five, and I was that I was
kind of I'm just going back to your comment you
had said earlier about the heroes had like small families. Yea,
so I have not explored that, so that that just
made me think of that. Was there anything else that
you wanted to like bring up or say about Thetis
(32:17):
and Achilles. You say thetis, I say thetis.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
So like American and English pronunciations, particularly on classical words,
is notorious. The Yeah, it's it's you can completely say
it however you want. It's it's difficult because, like there
is a letter in the Greek alphabet which is the eater,
which in Americans will tend to pronounce as an e
as a long e, and Brits will tend to say air,
(32:43):
whereas that the in thetus is a short in the Greek.
Speaker 3 (32:47):
So like, yeah, but it's like, really, it's up for grabs.
Speaker 1 (32:52):
I'm like, oh my gosh, I didn't say it wrong anyway,
but that makes sense. Was there anything that you that
we did not cover about.
Speaker 4 (33:03):
I mean, I guess one of just one of my
kind of my favorite things about her that I kind
of discovered as I was as I was doing this
was that, you know, I knew that she talks a
lot about having given birth to Achilles and the fact
that he's going to.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
Die, and all of that is interesting in and of
itself in imagining an immortal goddess giving birth.
Speaker 3 (33:26):
That is an interesting kind of proposition.
Speaker 2 (33:28):
But she also, in the Greek comes up with a
very specific word for this, which is what Homeric scholars
call a hapax logomenon, which means are once spoken, And
that means that it is a word that only occurs
this time in the entire corpus of ancient.
Speaker 3 (33:49):
Greek literature that we have wow, which.
Speaker 2 (33:52):
Is very very cool. It also means that it is
a very unusual word. It means that it is possibly
one that wasn't maybe even in currency, and it's one
that the poet kind of put together to express how
Thetis was feeling and how unusual she was.
Speaker 3 (34:10):
And the word in Greek is do.
Speaker 2 (34:14):
Aristo yeah, which means the worst and the best childbirtha.
And it's all one word, and basically you've got the
kind of the negative adjective, the positive adjective, and then
you've got to kea at the end, which means mother,
but it literally it means a child birtha in the feminine.
(34:34):
And I just think that that's so fascinating as a
way to try and articulate how she loves being his mom.
She you know, feels so fortunate to have given birth
to him, but she also knows that it is the
worst thing that she's going to experience, right, And I
feel like that's kind of for me as a mom,
(34:55):
I can really associate with that in that like the
highs are the highest you will ever have, the loads
are low, but it's because.
Speaker 3 (35:03):
It's because you care so much.
Speaker 2 (35:05):
And I just that word that's really like kind of
stayed with me because I think it's just it's such
a brilliant articulation of motherhood.
Speaker 1 (35:14):
I love that, and I think that does encapitulate about
being a mother. So all of the things that that
she experienced and all the things she knows she's going
to experience. Sort of I'm not even sure what that
would be be. Like, the only thing I can think
(35:37):
about would be when my father had cancer, you know,
and knowing that that death was eminent, we just didn't
know when. But living with living with that, you know,
it became like every phone call and you know, like
is this it?
Speaker 2 (35:53):
You know.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
I think Thetis must have been going through that that
she she knew it was going to that his end
was going to come quickly at some point, but she
didn't know exactly when.
Speaker 3 (36:06):
Which is so hard I'm not going to say it's worse,
but it's but it's really hard.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
It's an anticipation of It's like that feeling of impending
doom that you can't get away from, and then knowing
that that the doom is associated with your child. I
don't know, like how you you know, you move past that.
I do find it interesting that as a goddess she
(36:33):
was not that she was not spared birth in pain.
Speaker 2 (36:38):
A really interesting example of that, which I think I
talk about in the chapter, which is it's not in Homer,
but it's in a hymn that was ascribed in antiquity
to Homer, so they're called the Hameric hymns. Probably not
by the same poet as the Iliad, if the Iliad
was indeed by one poet at all. But there is
(36:59):
one which is the Hemeric Hymn to Apollo, and it
details Apollo's birth, and from his side of it, it's brilliant.
It's like a very divine birth in that he pops
out and he jumps straight up and he's already walking
and like, but from the woman's side, from Rito, who's
his mother for her, it's insanely difficult because Hero who
(37:21):
is jealous of her basically gets Illithuia, the goddess of birth,
pains and holds her back so Lito can't give birth.
Speaker 3 (37:29):
And you know, so she's really kind of.
Speaker 2 (37:31):
Straining and trying, and eventually she kind of finds a
place where she can do it, and she sits down
at the base of a tree and she finally gives birth.
But it's this extraordinary example of like prolonged labor, and
it's a goddess. So yeah, I think I think the
goddesses don't get a good time of it, even if
Apollo pops out and has a has a great birth and.
Speaker 1 (37:52):
The only one, I guess. And you know that that's
not fair because Athena pops out of Zeus's head, right.
Speaker 3 (38:00):
Us, Yeah, and so have labor paints.
Speaker 2 (38:05):
Well, he has his head off with an axe and
that's got to hurt a little bit, hasn't it?
Speaker 1 (38:11):
Call it a rap on this one?
Speaker 3 (38:13):
Yeah, yeah, that's great.
Speaker 2 (38:14):
Well, it will be nice to come back and talk
about women of the odysty. But yeah, I mean it's
I'm really glad you picked out that is because like
all the Iliad women, she's your favorite.
Speaker 1 (38:26):
I remember, you know, just thinking that just a lot
of the research that I had done. I just really
thought how she encap encapsulates the the grief of motherhood,
and you know, and I kind of lean to like
the tragic stuff because that's you know, I mean, there's
(38:49):
the joy is stuff, but it's the joy comes only
when you when you have the the opposite grieving forever.
It reminds me of our and Lord of the Rings,
and so we have these little glimpses of that mother's
and mother's grief and you know, parent grief of losing
(39:10):
a child is I think it's probably the worst, you know.
I So anyway, Thetis is kind of my favorite.
Speaker 2 (39:19):
Yeah, oh well yeah, really really glad, but you know,
it was, it was really fun.
Speaker 1 (39:24):
That's it for today's episode, Murmeredawn's a huge thank you
to doctor Emily Hauser for joining me and sharing her
incredible insight into the life and legacy of Thetis and
how archaeology and science have shed light on one of
the most complex and compelling goddess mothers in Greek mythology.
If today's conversation sparks something in new I highly recommend
(39:47):
her new book, Penelope's Bones. It is a brilliant fusion
of archaeology and myth and historical imagination that brings Bronze
Age women into the spotlight where they belong. And speaking
of Penelope, don't miss our next episode where Doctor Houser
will be back to talk about the Queen of Ithaca herself,
(40:09):
the wife, the weaver, survivor and the strategist. Until then,
thank you for listening and watching, and as always, drink
your wine and be merry. Mrmadon's
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