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

And that comes up in the writing, the linear B tablets of the late Bronze Age.

And that's a word that they were not using at the time that these poems were written down.

So it's almost like a sort of like archaeological fragment that's been left behind in the poem.

Well, it's not just a question of popularity, because what we're looking at here are epics that are, in some sense, preserving the memory of the past.

So if you think about what's happening over the kind of hundreds of years that these oral stories are being handed down, at that point, after the end of the Late Bronze Age, around 1200 BCE, we get a massive civilization collapse of that Late Bronze Age.

The Bronze Age collapsed, exactly.

And writing disappears.

So all you have left at that point are the songs that tell the glory stories of the days that have gone and the men that went before you, the generations of kings, to understand who you are.

For the Greeks, this was very much a project of understanding themselves and their history.

And there's one little anecdote that I really love, which is that apparently the Greeks believed that if all of the Greeks who'd been returning from the Trojan War had died on their way home, then they actually as a civilization would have become extinct.

So it's really like a founding event for them.

So yes, you're thinking about heroes, but this isn't quite the same as kind of thinking about the Marvel superheroes, because these are heroes who help you to understand who you are in the world.

They're also heroes you're probably going to be worshipping through hero cult.

So you're really interacting with and engaging with these heroes.

I think a hero is actually quite different for the ancient Greeks.

Yeah, and it's really interesting to kind of plumb that difference.

So the word is the same.

So the ancient Greek word for hero is heros.

It's where we get hero from.

But there are kind of two things I think we can pull out from that.

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