Dr. Emily Hauser

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1,990 appearances 4 recordings 1 series first heard Apr 2025 last heard 26 Jul

Dr. Emily Hauser’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.

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The Ancients · Odyssey | Cyclops, Circe and Calypso · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

We had to get into the Homer question.

Yeah, no, no, it has to be done.

I mentioned right at the beginning that we're looking at sung poetry here.

So you might be thinking, well, what does that mean?

When we're talking about the Odyssey, you've got a translation of the Odyssey over there.

I've got one right here.

Or you've got one right next to you, exactly.

And that's a text, that's written.

So what happened there?

Well, initially, these were sung poems that would have been what we call composed in performance.

So you would have had bards, experts in this kind of poetry, who would have been singing and piecing together these poems every single time they sang for an audience.

Now, those got passed down over hundreds of years.

And eventually, somewhere probably between the 8th and the 6th centuries BCE, those poems were written down.

And that became what we now call at least an early version of the Odyssey.

Now, in the ancient world, that was ascribed to the poet Homer.

So they thought that Homer was the poet of this particular version of the Odyssey.

I think what we're seeing now is that actually it's a lot more complicated than that.

And we're seeing a poem that is the end product of centuries and centuries of what we call transmission.

So that's handing down over the years between different bards.

And instead of just talking about one Homer, we're probably going to talk about a lot of Homers, a lot of bards, a lot of different poets who were contributing to this epic.

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