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

You expanded your horizons by sailing around.

This gave you this mental acuity.

The first few lines of the Odyssey say, Odysseus, the man who traveled to many cities and earned their minds in his ship.

And the swim, I mean, his great swim to Phaeacia, he does this epic swim, five-day swim, survives in the water.

Because if you were a Greek islander and you got your living from fishing and trading, as well as your smallholding, you absolutely had to be able to swim and dive brilliantly.

And the Greeks were very aware of that and very proud of it.

And that's why we get a great epic swim.

in the Odyssey, as an example to young men of what being a proper man is.

You've got to be able to swim.

So that is fundamental.

I really want to ban the word hospitality from discussions of Homer.

There's this word xenia, which means things to do with being other, things to do with being an alien, alienism.

We get it in our word xenophobic, so that's fear of the xenos.

What it was like to travel into unknown places where you have no previous contacts often, you hadn't got someone to look after you and have to trust people.

I think there were hotels, by the way.

I think there were plenty of hotels in Seaside Port.

But how could you trust that hotel manager?

not to stab you to death in the middle of the night because nobody knew who you were, there were no passports, take all your money and dump you in the sea.

Equally, if you're living on the island of Ithaca and a ship turns up from another island or maybe another country, Phoenicia,

How are you going to take somebody into your house or entertain them without deep fear that they could run off with your wife like Alexander?

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