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 · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
There is no more integral rule or protocol in Greek culture than Xenia.
Is this how ancient Greeks would have felt?
I think that most Greeks, certainly as early as this, we haven't got to the philosophers who start to question the existence of gods.
That's 200 or 300 years later.
I think most Greeks absolutely believed that they were surrounded by divinities, and not just these major Olympians, but every stream, every river.
There's a really, really crucial goddess called Hestia.
We hear a little about because she was so important, they didn't even need to talk about it.
That's the goddess of every household hearth.
who you would pray to every time you cooked.
She was with you.
If you were a tradesman, you would have Prometheus, Hephaestus and Athena.
These are technology gods with little shrines in your own workplace.
It's impossible really for us to put, I think, after 2000 years of monotheisms,
and 50 years of mass Gnosticism.
Anyway, it's quite impossible for us to put ourselves into this numinous mindset.
Their behaviour I find delightful because humans are so much more noble for the simple reason they're going to die.
So the gods can behave like naughty children
which they do, they're motivated by highly selfish designs.
They've got their own beloveds amongst the mortals and they're happy to sacrifice and murder plenty of other humans to look after their own.
If they're sexually motivated, they just do it.
Showing 161–180 of 337 · page 9 of 17
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