Professor Edith Hall

speaker

337 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Professor Edith Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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Dan Snow's History Hit · The Real History Behind The Odyssey · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

Homer was the absolute basis of all education.

We know that from many different kinds of source.

We know that if you're an aristocrat, you were expected to know them both epics off by heart.

I even think it's possible that writing was invented in the phonetic alphabet borrowed from the Phoenicians in order to write these things down.

plus the other great epic, which is by Hesiod, which explains the generation of the gods and the cosmos, because it happens at the dawn of really mass emigration and colonization to very remote places.

Your ship, when you went off with lots of other rather disenfranchised, bitter younger brothers who haven't inherited anything to colonize Libya or to colonize Ukraine,

you needed a copy of those poems because they contained everything you needed to know about being Greek.

So that meant that there was a proliferation of manuscripts everywhere the Greeks went.

Well, papyri originally.

which meant that by the time we get to Byzantium, where these epics remained core to the curriculum, despite the Christianity, there were far more manuscripts being copied out in the Byzantine world.

Dozens and dozens, every single scriptorium in every single Greek monastery would have its copies of these, which is why there were plenty to be exported in the late 14th and 15th centuries, and they arrived

In time, just before the Ottomans burnt down Constantinople, they got to Italy and into print in the 15th century.

But there was never any risk that we wouldn't get them, whereas there was a total risk we wouldn't get tragedy or lyric poetry.

You've absolutely got it.

How do you remember your Greek?

You take your epic poems.

And they have practical advice in them.

I have to say, in the Iliad, you have these very long scenes of sacrifice.

If you couldn't remember how your grandparents did the animal sacrifice, you've got 50-line descriptions, minute descriptions of how to do the sacrifice.

If you don't know what wood to use to make a raft, a small sailing craft to go fishing in, you've got it right there in the Odyssey when Odysseus makes his craft.

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