In Our Time did a great radio/podcast episode on The Greek Myths. As usual, they had a fascinating discussion with the experts. The show is British & scholarly, but not stuffy.

How to cover such a huge topic in less than an hour? They touched briefly on at least a dozen topics that left me wanting to know more. A few of the points:

• Some of the mythical figures, and stories of murder, incest, and eating your young (”completely bonkers” according to one of the participants)
• The different ages of Greece, and the relationship of history and myth
• The evolution and purpose of myth (”distilling 2000 years of scholarship into about a minute”, as another participant said)
• The great Greek tragedies competing with each other
• And one thought totally new to me — Pandora as Eve?

In Our Time: The Greek Myths

If you’re not familiar with this show, it’s a wide-ranging show about “the history of ideas”, with recent episodes covering such diverse topics as Newton’s Laws, Kierkegaard, the Statue of Liberty, and (of course) the Greek Myths. I get it as a podcast. Check it out at In Our Time.

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If you’re going on our Greece trip for women, you’ll find this especially interesting! You’ll be seeing some of these places in person. You might even stand in the very room at Mycenae where Clytemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon… (no-one knows for sure!)