Latest / The Partial Historians / Special Episode - Fatal Second Helen with Josh Cannon
Transcript
- Dr Rad 0:15 Welcome to The Partial Historians. We explore all the details of ancient Rome, everything from political scandals, the love affairs, the battles waged, and when citizens turn against each other. I'm Dr. Rad. Dr G 0:33 And I'm Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories. Dr Rad 0:44 Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Dr G 0:58 Hello, and welcome back to the Partial Historians. I am Dr. G. Dr Rad 1:05 And I am Dr. Rad. And Dr. G, I see you got the memo about the Spurius Furius T-shirt today. Dr G 1:12 For people on audio only, which is everybody, we're wearing the same T-shirt. Dr Rad 1:17 That's why I thought I just had to bring it to life verbally. Dr G 1:20 Yeah, well, if there's any time to be Spurius, Furius, it is today. Because we are sitting down with Josh Cannon to talk about his book, very exciting, The Veteran's Iliad. So, Josh Cannon, PhD, enlisted in the United States Marine Corps after high school and served two tours of Iraq, one in 2003 and then in 2004/5, and served as an Arabic linguist. He achieved the rank of sergeant and was honorably discharged in 2005 He then went on to the University of Pittsburgh, where he received his Bachelor of Philosophy in Anthropology and Linguistics, very impressive. Following this wasn't done with study yet, he went on to the University of Chicago, where he received his PhD in Near Eastern languages and civilizations, with a dissertation focused on the archeology of late Bronze Age Turkey. He is currently the director of research at the University of Pittsburgh's Frederick Honors College, and we're very excited to talk about his book today, entitled 'Fatal Second Helen: A Modern Veterans Iliad'. Welcome, Josh. Josh Cannon 2:37 Thank you for having me. Long time listener, first time caller, first time guest, I suppose. Really, really honored and excited to be here. Dr G 2:47 We are thrilled to have you, and I think this is a subject that's going to be quite interesting for our listeners, because bringing together the ideas that come forward through modern military service with an understanding of the ancient world, I think, is a subject that we haven't done a lot of work on in this podcast, so I think there's lots to delve into. Dr Rad 3:09 Yes, I must admit, my, my military service, it has slacked off of late, so Dr G 3:16 I think it's safe to say that neither of us have done military service. Dr Rad 3:18 Hey, hey, I have been beside the Romans in that many battles, Dr. G. Dr G 3:26 I can confirm that I'm very short-sighted, and I would never be accepted. Dr Rad 3:29 I think I think we all know with my hearing new chance of a glorious career for me. So, Josh, we'd love to know you have talked about in your introduction to the Fatal Second Helen, that it was reading Emily Wilson's 2023 translation of the Iliad that prompted you to rethink this foundational text. What made Wilson's translation a real catalyst for you? Josh Cannon 3:57 Well, I was really lucky because in 2019 Emily Wilson came to the University of Pittsburgh to talk about her translation of The Odyssey, which I want to say came out in 17, maybe 2018 give or take. So, just, just recently, you know, just before she was still on book tour, and she came to the University of Pittsburgh, and she just gave this absolutely brilliant talk about her translation, and she did so many clever and interesting things, for instance, she read from her translation, and when she got to a direct quote from Odysseus, she startled everybody in the room by like lowering her voice and making it like brutal and, and like gravelly, and like belting it out, and so when she finished the reading, she said, "Sorry, everybody, but that's just how I think Odysseus probably would have spoken. The guy wasn't such a good guy. So she just, like, she just really threw so much into this book talk, and and she obviously she talked about many other topics and explained how. So, so many brilliant translators, but obviously male translators had come before her, and she kept finding these translations that they made that were either not in the text at all or were kind of in the text, but they put a very, what's the right word, chauvinist kind of spin to it, and she gave some examples, one, and you know what, I wish I'd thought about this a little bit more, so I'm going to stumble through this a tiny bit, but one of the examples that she gave in her talk was the women who the suitors at the end of the Odyssey, the women who are consorts of the suitor, she uses that, if I remember correctly, she uses that term, consort, and other translators had used much more demeaning or kind of judgy terms for that particular role, and she said the Greek doesn't have, and I don't know the Greek term, unfortunately, off top my head, but she said the Greek term is not a judgey term, it's a very neutral term, and everyone before me kind of used some less polite language for, for these women, but I'm going to use the word consort, because that's a, the most accurate term, and b, not like, just, you know, it, not, not assuming negative things about that type of work or about that type of role, and I was really just excited at this idea that we've had the Odyssey for 26 - 2700 years, depending on, you know, who you think, or you know when you think it was written down, and she's bringing ideas to it that are I'd be cautious to say brand new. I would think that it's very possible somebody has talked about that particular word choice or some of those ideas, but as far as I know, she's the first person that put it all together in one big package and gave it to us as this really beautiful translation, and I want to say address that as well. She herself is a poet. She came to Pittsburgh again in 2023 or no, 2024 I'm sorry, 2024 And I got to see that talk as well. And in that talk, she was talking about her Iliad, and she talked about her poetry quite a bit, and she read a poem that she had written. It's really, it was very short, maybe 12 or 16 lines, I forget how long it was, but it was really.. it was about her mother and her daughter, and it was really sad and really beautiful, and it made me understand even better that she, even though she's a brilliant classical scholar, I think she's the chair of the University of Pennsylvania's Classics Department right now, she's also a really gifted, really gifted with words, and a really gifted poet. And so, when you read her translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and maybe you compare them to... So, my second favorite is Lattimore's translation, and his translation does not try to be flashy, it doesn't try to be beautiful, it tries to be accurate. And, as someone who studied ancient Greek a lot, Lattimore was great because I could translate a bunch of lines and then go read Lattimore to see how close I got, but if you want to understand why this is poetry and why it is beautiful, Lattimore can kind of get you there because he tells a story as well as can be done, because he's so direct from the Greek, ancient Greek to the English, but Wilson elevates it, as many have tried, Fagles and Lombardo, etc. Many, many have tried, but I think Wilson is the most successful at elevating it to a reading that is beautiful by itself, and then you recognize, oh, this is also a translation of Homer of the Iliad or the Odyssey, and so I might enjoy this just because of the word choice and the flow, the occasional alliteration, or what have you, but obviously I enjoy it at an even deeper level, because this is a 2600 year old poem that we've translated so many different times, and yet here is a new translation that is fresh and exciting and beautiful, and so I was really excited about her. So, anyway, I'm just a very long answer to your question. Dr Rad 4:43 Not at all. Josh Cannon 5:33 I was really excited about her, her Odyssey. And back then, in 2019 and 2020 I was on Twitter a little bit. I have since gotten off Twitter, Twitter, but Dr Rad 6:45 What? Why? Josh Cannon 7:01 Surprise! Dr G 7:04 Nobody saw it coming. Josh Cannon 5:57 So she was on, she also loved Twitter, but she was once on Twitter, and she was working on the Iliad, and she talked about working on the Iliad on Twitter, and every so often, like maybe three, every three months, I don't remember what frequency, she would give us a couple lines of her translation, and every time she did, I got a little bit more excited, and so I was really anticipating the Odyssey is just fine, don't get me wrong, but I love the Iliad, I've grown up reading the Iliad since I was a kid, and just captivated by it, so that was what I really wanted, and so I remember I pre-ordered her book, so that it would just show up in the mail one day, and I would kind of, you know, I pre-ordered it like three months in advance or something, and I was like, this will be great, because I'll come home from work one day, and there'll be a package, and I'll have forgotten that it's the release date for her book, and it'll be this lovely copy of the Iliad, and that's exactly what happened, and I started reading it, and I had the idea for my book had been in my head for years and years and years, and I'd written the introduction and pieces of different parts, like some stories that I wanted to relate from my own experience, and then I sat on it for a couple of years, or I just, I never really forgot about it, but I stopped paying attention to it, and then when I started reading her translation of the Iliad, I thought, oh, okay, I'm going to use this text to inform my text, it'll be Emily Wilson's translation of the Iliad that I'm going to write about, not Lattimore or Lombardo, or et cetera, they're great, I'm not trying to knock anybody down, but I was so excited about hers, and I was like, okay, I'm going to use this momentum and this enthusiasm to carry over into my book, and so I read her book very, very closely. It took me several months, because I was just really looking at it, and I was reading secondary literature on different passages, and I was writing my own book while I was reading her translation, and so the timing was right, I think I was ready to write my book. The release of her book was really exciting to me, as I indicated, and so I guess I can't say that there's anything about her writing that just made me have to write my own book. It's just that I like it so much, and I like her so much that I allowed that enthusiasm to carry me through the hard work, and you guys have written a book together. I know that hard work of putting an actual book together, I was able to kind of piggyback on my enthusiasm for her translation to carry me along. Dr Rad 7:30 What a testament. Dr G 7:30 I think that's a wonderful way to think about the process of writing as well, the way that you can be inspired by the works around you to encourage your own workflow, and I very much feel with you that Wilson's translations of the Odyssey and the Iliad have broken some new ground in the sense that when you pick them up and you're not feeling super strong in your ancient Greek, and I never have, I've - I did Greek a long time ago, and I can recognize little words here and there, but I'm no way able to read ancient Greek. To have something that, when you pick it up, feels incredibly fresh and immensely readable in the way that some translations feel like a struggle. I found that quite incredible and a testament to her capacity to hold all of her classical knowledge of the language, and the understanding that we have at this point in time about the way the Greeks were in this period of their history, and to bring all of that, and to also make it feel like it was, it flowed, and it was something that still had relevance for now. I think is an incredible achievement on her part. So, I'm with you. I can see how that might inspire book writing, for sure. Josh Cannon 13:11 Yeah, she's been really open with her writing process. She's done a bunch of interviews, and she's published a handful of kind of like popular media articles about word choices and sentence choices, and I've gobbled all of those up, and I just love how open she has been to letting us all speak behind the curtain, so to speak. And so, as I said, she's not on Twitter anymore, but she switched over to Substack, but then she stopped. Well, I haven't checked recently, but she stopped putting articles up there, but she would write about the process, as she used to when she was actively translating on Twitter, so I'm really grateful that she allows us to see her process so, so well. I think that's not very common. Dr Rad 13:52 Yeah, I mean it's one of those things I think that a lot of people, particularly people who are just sort of interested in history, you know, as a casual interest, you don't often obviously stop and think about how subjective the process of translation can be, and how much context can obviously affect those translations, and I think definitely her translation of the Odyssey and the Iliad have stood out because she has been so forthright about the very deliberate choices that she was making throughout that process, it definitely shines a light on why you need fresh translations, because with each generation there will be those different interpretations that come through. Dr G 14:34 And I think, yeah, this speaks nicely to thinking about what's going on with the text itself, and how that starts to inform your own writing as well. So, you talk about individual glory as one of these key ways that Achilles is understood in the Iliad, and I'm really interested in the way that the ancient Greek concept of glory compares or contrasts to our contemporary Western concept of glory. Josh Cannon 15:04 Yeah, that's that's a big question. That's a big part of the book, is kind of grappling with that very thing. Achilles is more or less the star of the show, right? For the Iliad, there's loads and loads of characters, and I don't even think Achilles is the most interesting character, I'm a sucker for Hector myself, but he's kind of, I mean, he's in the very first line: "Sing Goddess the rage of Achilles," and so, and he, all of the things that he does, more or less determine everything that follows, right, in the rest of the book, so I don't argue that he's the star of the show, and then he is chasing that undying glory. He won't, he knows he's gonna die young, or we don't know exactly how old he is, but he's probably.. I always assume Achilles is like in his late 20s, but Dr Rad 15:54 He's Brad Pitt's prime, that's what it is. Josh Cannon 15:57 That's right. So he knows that he's gonna die young, he's very aware of it, and he's okay with it, because he also knows he'll die with the greatest glory that that could be had in his generation, and so I think that there is a so that element of, oh, I want as much glory as I can get, that's still around, right? We see that in a lot of different ways. One of my favorite ways to point to it is, is 80s and 90s movies, because that's what I grew up watching, and Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone just defeating entire armies by themselves and doing it stoically, and looking incredible as they do so, and just being that one person that can do what needs to be done, whatever the movie is telling us, that needs whoever needs to be saved, or whatever bad guy needs to be killed, and so I grew up, you know, watching those voraciously, and it took me, and then I joined the Marine Corps, maybe, maybe not unsurprisingly, and it took me a while to kind of divorce that perception of value and glory and what have you from reality and where I've kind of landed and what I talk about in the book is in the Iliad the people that can do the most violence are the most exciting people and kind of the most valued people and so the Iliad does not tell us this, but my amateur psychologist mind does. The pursuit of glory is one layer, but if you go beneath that layer, you're really talking about the pursuit of acceptance, right? So, if you're the most glorious warrior, the most famous, the most feared, the most admired. Well, what that means is the people who are admiring you want you around. They think you're awesome, and so you know, human beings, Homo sapiens, are very, very social creatures. We want to be in communities that want us to be there. The opposite of glory is shame, the idea that we are not wanted, that the our community doesn't like us or wants to reject us, and so I write about that as well in the book. This idea that shame, there's a push-pull, right, glory and shame, they're pursuing glory and they're avoiding shame, and I write about how shame is as frightening as a physical threat, sometimes. Right, the idea that your community would reject you can be as scary as being terribly wounded, because it is a life-threatening scenario, or at least our brain thinks that it's a life-threatening scenario. In most cases, it is not, but that's what that's what embarrassment is. Embarrassment is fear of social rejection, and everyone's been embarrassed, and you get embarrassed, and you just freeze up, and you feel awful, and you don't want anyone to look at you, and you just replay the thing that happened over and over again in your mind, and that's your body, that's your brain telling you this is a threat, if those people that saw that thing happen don't want you around anymore, well, what are you going to do? How are you going to protect yourself? How are you going to feed yourself? Who's going to protect you? And so I connect glory and shame to social acceptance, and it's fascinating. It's that Achilles, who wants, let's call it social acceptance at the highest level is willing to end his life early to get it, when the pursuit of social acceptance is for the purpose of living longer and living happier and having a longer life, and so there's a really fascinating - I don't know if irony is the right word for it - but the fascinating contradiction in that pursuit of glory, and I think that again, to your question, we're, we're still doing it. It's a little bit different now in the modern day military. What I, one of the things that I can bring to the Iliad a little bit distinctively, absolutely, people are chasing after glory, and, and I, and I was too. I'm not, you know, trying to point to others and not include myself, and I write about how the military uniform, and this is not just for the United States, but for pretty much any country, is a text upon which is read all the glorious things that you have done, what your rank is, what medals you have won, whether you're an enlisted person or an officer, or what have you, and so we are literally walking around, if we're in our dress uniforms, we're literally walking around with a text of the glorious things that we have done. Now that's not the sole purpose of of the uniform. The uniform is important for understanding seniority, who outranks whom. It's important for recognizing maybe some of the skills that you have. I can only speak about American uniform, US uniforms in particular, but you can have different devices that indicate I'm an expert in this or I've got training in that, and so they are informative in ways that are not purely about glory, but there's a whole lot of glory in those uniforms, and so I think that's kind of our new version, or not new, I mean, the Romans, you guys, you know better than I do how the Romans would have standards and grass crowns, and what have you, and different displays of military glory, so it's not new by any stretch, but that's how we're doing. Dr Rad 21:15 They liked shirtlessness. Josh Cannon 21:17 Yeah Dr Rad 21:17 Shirtlessness is lots of scars on the front. Josh Cannon 21:21 but where I think there's a big difference, so that's all I would say. What is similar? One of the big things that is different is that when Achilles withdraws from battle and begs his goddess Mother Thetis to make the Greeks to make it so that the Greeks will beg him to come back, he is allowing or encouraging or hoping for the death of his fellow war fighters, and that's a big, big no-no. Nowadays, understandably, right? I mean, it should have been probably a no-no in the time of the Iliad. Dr G 21:56 Feels like it might have been for Achilles as well. Yeah, awkward. Josh Cannon 21:59 Yeah, I think it was a bad idea, maybe in any time period, but Achilles gets away with it, at least in the, in the context of the Iliad. We have a term in the United States military for someone who chooses themselves over their, over the others, and it's got a couple different names, some of them use swear words, so I'll avoid those, but Blue Falcon is kind of the most famous iteration of it, and so being called a "blue falcon" today means you are not taking care of your friends, you're looking out for yourself, you're hurting your others, and so Achilles is absolutely like Mount Rushmore, top-notch blue falcon from our perspective today, and he doesn't, he knows that well, he doesn't know about our perspective, but he knows the consequences of what he's done, and he doesn't care. The only time he does care is when his best friend is killed, and then he's like, "Oh, shoot, I'm really upset now", but it had to be something that he held personally dear, and so I think that that's a big shift. And then there's the Spartan poet Tyrtaeus, whom I write about as well. He, you know, we don't know exactly his time period. He's probably sixth century, seventh century, so maybe a contemporary of Homer, or what have you. And he is already writing poems to young Spartan warriors about how you don't leave the battle line, you don't leave troops behind, you do protect the person next to you with your shield, and so already at this roughly the same time as Homer, we're having people writing about the importance of protecting the person next to you in battle, and so I think the Iliad, maybe the Iliad almost stands alone in some ways as depicting military glory as a super selfish thing, or at least the way that Achilles does, but it's not just Achilles, Hector has another example of it too. There's this just gorgeous scene where he's speaking with a drama key, his wife and his son, his baby son Astyanax, is there, and he's the baby cries because Hector's helmet is frightening, so Hector takes his helmet off, and it's this really touching and beautiful scene. And then Andromache says, "Don't go back to battle, if you die, the city will fall, and we'll all be enslaved and taken away." And he, in my mind at least, he pauses, and he says, "Yeah, you're right, that would be terrible, but I'll be dead." So it's like, oh no, you've there's this beautiful scene where you're being, you're being, you're being a caring father, but you're also being like, oh man, that would be rough, I won't be around to see it, so that's a small, that's a comfort to me. Dr G 24:39 You're like, well... Come on, Hector. Dr Rad 24:42 Out of sight out of mind. Yeah. Josh Cannon 24:44 Well, I think so. Right, Hector is fascinating, and he's, he's the most human, in my opinion, the most human person in the Iliad, and even he is struggling with, so to speak, the push-pull of the glory and shame. And so, yeah, the Iliad is, I would argue, pretty distinctive in that regard, because, like I said, we have Tyrtaeus at roughly the same time period with a fairly different philosophy, and absolutely modern day military does not embrace that philosophy, so that's just one more reason the Iliad is fascinating, I suppose. Dr Rad 25:23 Yeah, no, I'm really interested in delving into the way that Achilles and Hector, in particular, serve as the symbols for different ancient values when it comes to that warrior culture that existed. How do they serve as models that reinforce or call into question the values of contemporary military culture? Josh Cannon 25:43 Well, I think - So there's an.. and my Greek is even worse than yours, I suppose. So, I won't try to do it, but there is.. I have not a couple times in the Iliad. Diomedes, I believe, says it when he is talking to Glaucos, and I forget who the other character is, but it's the exact same line. Wilson interesting translates it just a little bit differently, but in the Greek it's exactly the same, and it says that you must always strive to be the best, better than all the others. And I think that obviously there are some problems with that attitude, I would argue, but there's also some positive aspects to it, right. So I think a positive translation of it that is relevant to today's military is, well, I can use the old what's the old army motto, "be the best that you can be", or something like that. So I'm sorry, listeners, you're probably banging your hands on the steering wheel right now, but I'm fumbling the 1990s motto for the army, but the idea was, be the best, be the best that you can be, and I think the Iliad loves that too, and that's what everyone's trying to do, Achilles is doing it the best, he's the best at being the best, but all of them are trying to outdo one another, and I think that the Marine Corps, in particular, prides itself of all the services in the United States military. The Marine Corps prides itself the most on having the highest standards and pushing Marines push themselves harder in a variety of different ways than other service members, and so when I see that expression and that idea appear in the Iliad, I'm like, oh, I remember that, like, that, that's still something that that we still talk about today, this concept of just putting everything out there and pushing yourself as hard as you can. Now, in the Iliad, they're doing it for their own glorification. I think a difference then would be that nowadays, because the attitude is much more protect the person next to you and support your buddies and your fellow fighters, you want to be the best, so that, yeah, so that you can look good and maybe be the most impressive, but you also want to be the best, because it gives you the best chance of protecting people, and something another thing that I write about is, so in the United States military, the highest honor you can get is the, is the Medal of Honor, or so I should say, the highest award you can get is the Medal of Honor, and I did some research on, well, what does it take to get the Medal of Honor? And sometimes it means killing a lot of bad guys, but far more frequently it means saving a lot of your own people. It means, you know, so so and so received a Medal of Honor because they saved, you know, 20 of their platoon mates when a rocket hit the bunker, and they were able to shield everybody from the blast, and I thought, well, isn't that pretty great, that we, the highest award that one can get in the United States military is generally speaking an award that's given for saving lives instead of taking lives. I was like, that's, I'm proud of that, that's lovely, that's a really nice way to think about it, we certainly have people that have killed enormous numbers of combatants, and that is also admired and respected in the United States military, but it is less frequently given the Medal of Honor, and so that idea of being the best, one of the, the most significant way that we award being the best is when you're the best at saving lives. I think that's great. Dr G 29:27 It certainly is prioritizing the idea of the cooperation that needs to exist, because it sounds to me like, as somebody with absolutely no military experience and high degrees questions about military experience in general, is that it sounds like there is a tension a little bit between individual success and what that looks like, and maybe the competition that might happen amongst members of the Marine Corps, for instance, and then the moment where the group as a whole is getting tested, and how do you translate your desire individually in a competitive sphere of bestness into making sure that everybody is able to be as successful as possible? Josh Cannon 30:16 Yeah, I think, I mean, Marine Corps boot camp has a lot of group activities, group challenges, where nobody can really stand out, and the only way to stand out is to support everybody and get through this obstacle course, or get this heavy thing from A to B, and so even at the very beginning of that path, you're being told this is a group activity, and you will either succeed or fail as a group. Now, there's also other aspects of basic training boot camp that do glorify the individual, so you can't escape it, but you're right, it's very much there at the very beginning. Dr G 30:55 So, thinking about the title that you've selected for this book, Fatal Second Helen, which is drawn from a line by poem written by Patrick Shaw-Stewart, someone who served and died in the First World War. I'm interested in the connection that you see between the way the Iliad remains a touchstone for understanding war through generations. Josh Cannon 31:21 Interesting. Yeah, so, so the Patrick Shaw-Stewart poem, I just love it so much. Although it's terribly sad, I discovered it.. oh gosh, I don't know when, after I was in the military, and probably while I was in college, or maybe even grad school, and it spoke to me so, so impactfully and instantly. Shaw-Stewart didn't give it a title, they found it in his desk. He didn't even publish it after he died, died in France in World War One. They found it in his desk, and so they published it posthumously. And so I think it's often called "Stand in the Trench Achilles". I've seen a couple different titles for it, because I guess he didn't give it one, but that, that is to me the most impactful line: "Stand in the trench, Achilles ... and shout for me", right? And I really both, through reading that poem and writing my book, and Fatal Second Helen is taken from that book, as you said, or from that poem. I apologize, that line is the most and my opinion, the most impactful line of the poem, because he's basically saying, "Save me, like, come save me, this is terrible, I need to be saved." And it's so anti-glory. Nobody, I mean, every so often somebody in the Iliad gets scared, Hector runs away from Achilles, but it's so rare that anyone says, "Please come save me". I mean, they'll say, "Ajax, please come help us", which is right next door to "Come save me". But, and so, there's such tremendous vulnerability in that line, and I was always so struck by it. And then, of course, you know, after he writes that poem, I don't know how much, how, what the time frame is, but after he writes that poem, he is killed, and so, when I, my initial title to the book was "A Veteran's Iliad", and my publisher was like, "Oh, okay, that's that's nice, we should keep that, but what if we do something colon "A Veteran's Iliad", and then it became, and then he inserted Modern. I said, "Okay, I like, I like modern too, so I have no problem with "A Modern Veteran's Iliad", and I said, "Well, what if we chose a line from the Patrick Shaw-Stewart poem? and I shared it with him, and he had not read it before, and he loved the poem. Everyone I've shared it with loves it. So, if you're a listener and you haven't found it, I encourage you to do so. It's not that long. And we bounced around a bunch of titles, and I was like, "What about Standing the Trench Achilles?" But then I thought, well, but I, as much as I love that line, and is as reflective of the poem as it is, that's not what my book is about. I'm not asking somebody, I'm done, I'm out of it. I'm not asking for someone to come save me. And he had suggested "Fatal Second Helen", which hadn't occurred to me, so he's talking about World War Two as the second Helen, the second thing that draws people to Turkey, particularly. He was in Turkey when this was happening, or when he was writing this poem. The World War Two is the fatal second Helen that brings people to war, and I thought that's it, because my book is about just how terrible war is, and how problematic the pursuit of glory in through the use of violence and being valued by your society, because you're good at values, how problematic it is. I thought Fatal Second Helen was a fascinating way to try to capture that, because it's fatal, right? It's a big bad problem to want to go to war, to want to be good at war, and either you're going to die or other people are going to die, and so it's very fatal. So I couldn't call it a fatal third Helen. Nobody would have known what on earth that could mean. So, I was like, well, let's go with "Fatal Second Helen". And the other thing I liked about it, I guess, from a purely marketing point of view, is like people are like, what does that mean? Like, why is this Helen fatal two times, or the second hell? One was the first Helen, also fatal, so I thought it was kind of a provocative title for people to be like, what is going on there? Dr G 35:07 Ah Helen, she's done it again! Dr Rad 35:09 Damn that Helen of Troy! Josh Cannon 35:12 So I was - when he suggested it - I was thrilled at that title, and I think the poem is just a beautiful reminder of how terrible war is. It's not a poem that's trying to talk about how great it is or exciting or glorious, it's both the poem itself and then the context of the poem. The fact that he dies after begging to be saved is really tragic, and I feel grateful that I found a way to include it in my title. And then, of course, I write about, I talk about it in the book itself. Dr Rad 35:42 Yeah, and I guess I guess that's one of the appeals of, of even the Iliad itself. If it was perhaps just about conflict, I don't know if it would have the lasting impact that it has had. You know, it's the emotions that come along with conflict that stand out. I mean, as you said, like, some of the scenes you've talked about that really touched you, they're not necessarily like the battlefield scenes, you know, or well, those sorts of moments, they're the moments between a husband and wife before he's about to go out and, you know, and fight, and it's those sorts of moments I think that probably stand out, and, of course, you know, we haven't talked about this, but you could also highlight scenes like a course, you know, Priam wanting to get Hector's body back, and those sorts of moments are the ones that probably actually stand out once people have encountered these texts. So I think that that really highlights something really valuable about all of these works, that it's the emotions that we go through with conflict that, that make these probably worthwhile for us to revisit. Josh Cannon 36:47 I agree completely. I mean, I think I think the Iliad is is often like an action movie where when Achilles comes back to fight, it is a thrilling read. It's obviously terrible and violent, but it's thrilling. He fights a river god, for goodness' sakes, but the moments that I remember even better are exactly what you said, when Priam comes to ransom the body, or when Andromache and Hector are consoling their child, or Patroclus - we haven't talked about Patroclus yet, but I love that guy - I think Hector is more interesting, but Patroclus is just such a good guy, and he's running around the Greek camp, checking on the wounded, making sure it was okay, begging Achilles to help the Greeks, like he's a, he's a good person, he's someone I would want if I had to go into a fight. I'd like, I'd like Patroclus to be there, and then the tragedy of Patroclus, listen, even he gets caught up in this, in this trap of being glorious, so Achilles says, okay, yeah, yeah, go give him some breathing room, but don't go attack the city of Troy, and of course he immediately is so successful that he's able to actually try to climb the walls of Troy and angers Apollo, and then Apollo sets it up, so what he knocks his armor off, and then Euphorbus stabs him in the back, and then Hector stabs him in the front, and, and, so, as much as we want to like Patroclus, he's a lot like Hector, and that he's stuck in the push pull, too. We only see it with him for a really Hector, we see it the whole book, more or less. Patroclus gives us just book 16, basically. He's a single book. Obviously, we see Patroclus before book 16, but that's when - that's his book, you know, the rise, and I think I title when I write about that book, I call "The Rise and Fall of Patroclus", because all in one book he's a superhero, and then he's dead, but yeah, no one in the Iliad really is able to escape it. Dr Rad 37:33 Hmm. Now, you've talked about the fact that Hermes Iliad doesn't come out of nowhere. It seems to obviously draw upon other stories that come out of the West Asia region, including the epic of Gilgamesh. I'm wondering if you can take us through some of the connections you see between Homer's text and that cultural milieu that it emerges from. Josh Cannon 38:42 Yeah, happy to talk about that. So, my background, I'm not a classicist. I did a lot of classics as undergraduate, and I did some as a grad student, but really I'm a Near Eastern Studies scholar, and as you indicated, the beginning, focusing on late Bronze Age Turkey, Anatolia, and really the Hittites, who would have been the neighbors, more or less the neighbors of the ancient Trojans of the Trojan War. Part of my education, and I'm really grateful for this, was reading a lot of Near Eastern mythology, and just being fascinated at all the connections there are to classical mythology, and one of my favorite books is Martin West's "East Face of Helicon", which also is a brilliant title, because Helicon is the mountain that the Muses live on, and they are the inspiration for all stories and myths, etc. and tales, and what have you, and so he's talking about the Eastern face, the face that is looking to Turkey and Iraq and Syria, and what have you. So I just love that title. So he writes in that book, it's. It's a brilliant book. It is just pretty much connecting every dot that he could find. He passed away 10 years, I don't forget exactly when, somewhat recently, but and this book came out in, I think, 1996 so it's already 30 years old. But in this book, East Face of Helicon, he connects basically every single dot he can find between classical mythology and Near Eastern mythology, and there is an enormous number, a stunning number of connections, so many. In fact, he's got a famous.. well, to me it's famous. I don't know if it's famous to others, and a famous quote where he says Greek mythology is Near Eastern mythology. Now, that didn't come out of this book, that came out of another article that he had, but I was struck by that, and so the Iliad is, is as the earliest of our Greek myths, is indeed very closely connected to Gilgamesh. So, of course, Achilles is Gilgamesh, and Patroclus is Enkidu. You've got these two warriors who are very close partners, and one of them dies, which provokes the other to kind of do some soul searching and to go on, I guess you could call an adventure for Gilgamesh, right? He tries to find, uh, immortality, and with Achilles, I don't know, I would call that an adventure either, because he just goes on a rampage, but who reacts strongly, let's say, to the death of their partner, and so from a trope point of view, there's a lot of connections there, but even if you get down to these nitty gritty details, so I'll give you one of my favorite examples. Interestingly enough, Diomedes is the stand-in for Gilgamesh in this example, not Achilles, because when Achilles, when Achilles steps away from the war, all these other heroes get this chance to rise up and be dominant, and Diomedes is kind of the first to do so in book five and six of the Iliad, and so he just goes on a tear, beats up a bunch of people, beats up Aeneas, and is about to kill him. And then Aphrodite, the mother of Aeneas, comes down to save her son, and Diomedes throws a spear at her, and it scratches her wrist, and so she drops Aeneas, and she flees to heaven, and Apollo ends up catching Aeneas and saving him, and so Aphrodite flees to heaven, and she goes to Zeus and Dione, and she goes, "Mom, Dad, you know this jerk hurt me, and Dione is not well, a Zeus and Dione, if we follow Hesiod, are not the mother and father of Aphrodite. She is the, let's call it, product of severed testicles falling into the sea by Cyprus, right, so... Dr Rad 42:31 What a neat way of putting it. Dr G 42:35 An image that never gets old. Josh Cannon 42:39 But in the Iliad, Zeus is her father, and this woman named Dione is her mother, a goddess who, I mean, she appears a few times, but who does not have a very strong presence in Greek mythology, and if you look at her name, and this is from Martin West, this is not from me, but if you look at Dione's name, it's actually a feminine form of Zeus's name in the genitive, so I, when I talk about this, she is "Mrs. of Zeus", that's a translation for her name, and so that's this kind of strange, but like, okay, I mean, Homer and Hesiod, they're different people, different traditions, if you look at, I believe it is tablet six of Gilgamesh, Ishtar, who is the Babylonian goddess of love and war, approaches Gilgamesh and says, "Hey, I think you're pretty handsome. I'd like to get together with you. And he says, "No", quite brusquely, quite rudely. And she goes up to heaven and she says, "Mom, Dad, this mortal really hurt my feelings. Well, her mother and father, Anu and Antu, and Anu is sky god, and Antu is "Mrs. Sky God", and so when you look at the way Zeus and Dione exist, I guess morphologically, and you look at that same, well, not necessarily a masculine ending, but a feminine ending on the Antu goddess, it's the same thing, Zeus and Dione are Anu and Antu, and the goddess of love goes to them because she has been wounded by a warrior, and so Martin West is pointing all of this out, and this is so in my mind, so clearly one to one. There's such a strong match between this Gilgamesh story, which I mean, the history of Gilgamesh is very complicated, but the most common version that we work with is called the Standard Babylonian version. We don't know exactly when that was published, but 1300 BC, 1400 BC, is a, is a pretty decent guess, but it's borrowing from earlier traditions that go all the way back to at least 2100 BC, and that's just the written versions. There certainly would have been oral traditions that would have proceeded 2100 BC, so now this particular story of Ishtar going to Anu and Antu does not necessarily extend that far back, or we don't see evidence for it extending that far back, but if even if you just stick with, let's say, 13 or 1400 BC, it's fascinating to me that that story is replicated. More or less, point for point in the Iliad, and I, and nobody's really tried to provide an answer for this, or I think it's a very.. you would only be able to be speculative, right? It's very difficult to say, well, this is clearly how it happened. So, my personal answer to it, as well, you know, Homer, if there was a Homer, traditionally was an Ionian, right? So he's living on the coast of Turkey, or the west coast of Turkey, and the Hittites, who would have been many hundreds of years before the writing of the Iliad, but the Hittites knew of the Gilgamesh story, they had their own copies of it, and so what's really attractive to me is to think, well, it might have existed only as an oral tradition after the fall of the late Bronze Age civilizations, but it might have continued on, and these different bards were just wandering around Greece and Turkey, collecting stories and adding to the Iliad, and making it their own, and just layering and layering onto it, and one of them was like, "Oh my gosh, that Gilgamesh story is so cool, I gotta cook that into my Iliad somehow, and they're like, "Well, we, you know, my predecessor really threw a lot of diomedes into this, because, because there's no Achilles, and we want this to be exciting, so we threw Diomedes into spice things up until Achilles comes back. Oh, I can make, I can make the Diomedes seem even better, I can steal this Gilgamesh story and give it to Diomedes, and just swap some names, and so that's my best guess as to how this happened, but there's so many examples. That's my favorite example, but there's so many examples of this, where clearly Greek mythographers - we don't know exactly how, but we're getting their hands on, or their ears on these really neat Near Eastern Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Assyrian stories, Phoenician, and playing with them, re, you know, reusing them for their own stuff, and so I just find that fascinating. Some really great scholars who have worked on that are Maria Bachvarova, another one is López-Ruiz, is her last name, Carolina López-Ruiz, she's at University of Chicago now. They have both somewhat recently kind of grappled with, well, how did this happen? How did the Greeks become aware of all these interesting near eastern stories? So, if anyone listening is interested, those are two great authors to pursue. And then, of course, Martin West. Dr Rad 47:11 Yeah, Dr G 47:11 I think there is a lot to be said, and it's maybe one of the areas of study of the ancient world that is gaining more traction over time, and I think there's been a really big push within the field of classics in ancient history to expand away from just Greece and Rome and be like this is a whole Mediterranean situation, and realistically what we're looking at, or what appears to be emerging, is a pattern of a shift from east to west over time, and the Romans cop a lot of flack for copying the Greeks, and they're like, they don't have anything original, but we're now reaching a point pretty substantially with the evidence base, we'd be like, "those Greeks are just copying the East, they're copying the Sumerians, whatever", so this idea of Greek sitting as some sort of like ancient cultural pinnacle is really open to question, and I'm really fascinated to see how that then transforms into sort of popular understanding over time, and it seems to take about 30 to 40 years for things like that to sort of shift in the mindset of the public, so I think this kind of work is super important and useful, because we have things like the Epic of Gilgamesh, and we have those different versions, incomplete tablets at times, but going back so far, and then to see those connections being brought out, I think is incredibly useful, so particularly because we know that this war in the Iliad is happening in Anatolia, it's not, it's not in Greece, the Greeks are going to Troy and are like, "Hello, we're here to mess things up for you, and everybody in Troy is like, "Excuse me, why did you come here?" Dr Rad 48:56 "You seen these walls here?" Dr G 49:00 Why? We're just living our lives, so it's not really clear that the Greeks should be considered the good guys in any particular way. All right, so enough of my rants on that, though. To wrap things up, I think it's pretty clear through what we've been discussing so far some of the connections already, but I am interested in how you would say that your background in active military service has influenced and does influence the way you interpret historical and mythological accounts of war, and can this add depths of understanding to the way we think about things like the Iliad? Josh Cannon 49:40 Yeah, I like to think so. I already talked a little bit about Achilles, and how that kind of behavior would be a lot less acceptable now than it was in mythological trodden war time. Another really good example is Agamemnon, whom we haven't spoken of yet, and shame on us, he's maybe the only one we left out. But... Dr G 50:00 He would hate that as well. Dr Rad 50:03 I did it deliberately. Dr G 50:03 Like how dare you? Josh Cannon 50:07 There's a spectacular book called "Achilles in Vietnam", and it's this brilliant look at Vietnam veterans. It's got a lot of stories, a lot of testimonials from Vietnam veterans, and Jonathan Shay, the psychiatrist, comes in. He goes, "Well, let's look at the Iliad, and let's see how Achilles behaves in the Iliad, and see if that is kind of realistic, and if that matches the way people suffering from war trauma might actually behave". And his argument is absolutely, he's clear, Achilles is clearly suffering from - he doesn't, Jonathan does not like the term PTSD - he talks about moral injury, is a phrase that he's much more in favor of, and he's still, he's still alive. I think he's in his 90s, so, but he, I haven't seen anything from him for a while, so I think he's enjoying a very well-earned retirement, but, but yeah, his book, "Achilles in Vietnam", is this brilliant discussion of the Iliad gets a lot of stuff right, and so I read that book, maybe 10 or 15 years ago, and I remember going into it being very skeptical, like, oh, I'm classically educated, and and I'm a war veteran, I don't see this connection, like, what are you talking about, Jonathan Shay, and within one chapter, like, oh, he nailed it, he's brilliant. This is amazing, and I so - such a rapid turnaround on my part - and so he talks about Agamemnon in particular as being a very bad leader, and so I went a little bit further with that in my own thinking. I thought, well, what would Agamemnon have? I seen leaders like Agamemnon, and what Agamemnon is, is he's the top boss, because he brings the largest number of troops and the largest number of ships, and he's the wealthiest king of Greece, so I guess you could say he earned it in a sense, but also he was born into that situation, so he's in charge because he's wealthy, and I'm like, well, that's not great to start with, and then he's not a terribly good leader. He allows Achilles to storm off, and he vacillates, you know. He tries to leave two or three times. He's like, "Should we get out of here, everyone? Should we actually leave?" Such a problematic leader for a variety of reasons. And I start - because of Jonathan Shay's work - I kind of reevaluated Agamemnon from my own perspective, and what I really came to realize, and what I came to struggle with, is just how important it is to have strength in your leadership and to have predictable behavior, moral, ethical behavior, because when you don't have those things, when you have a leader who is unpredictable, who is amoral, who is unethical, well, they're just adding, adding a whole new layer of threat to something that's already quite threatening, which would be, you know, a combat zone. And then, and again, Shay talks about this as well. I'm not acting like I've invented these ideas, but I write about them and explore them in my own way in the book, and so that's what's dangerous about Agamemnon and Achilles is reacting to this is he's not acting in the right way, he's not making good choices, good leadership choices, good moral choices, you know, you name it, he's making bad, selfish choices, and I think anyone who started in the military had at least one leader for hopefully a short period of time, but at least one point in time, behave this way, and, and you just feel so powerless, because the nature of the military is, if someone's in charge of you, they've got a lot of authority over you, the type of authority that civilians don't really have a way to conceptualize. When I teach this, I try to tell my students, and this might be a little bit more of a United States thing than an international thing, but you know we have different types of police officers here, and kind of, well, multiple layers of scariness in these police officers, unfortunately, but and some of them are newer and more scary than they have been in the past, but, but traditionally police officers called state troopers, so they're police officers are that are state employees, not maybe city community employees, and they're kind of held a higher standard, right? Because, because they're representing the state, and so Tommy students, well, I don't know if you've ever been pulled over for speeding or having a broken tail light or, you know, expired tags or whatever, but you've been pulled over by a state trooper. They're very polite, but it's unambiguous that they're in charge, and that they could give you a fine, or they could, they could, I mean, hopefully I don't know what you would be doing to get arrested, but they have a lot of power over you in that moment of being pulled over, and I say that's every day in the military, the people that are around you, they can punish you on a whim if you're in combat, they can send you on a dangerous mission, and you really have no recourse, but to say - I mean, I shouldn't say there's no recourse - there are there are ways to say, 'Hey, this is poor leadership, or something wrong is happening', but they're very, very difficult to access, and they come with a bit of a risk, because if you are decided against in those situations, then it just gets worse for you, so. There's a lot of risk in trying to say, hey, something is wrong here. And so having leaders like Agamemnon can be really traumatizing, because they have so much power over you and what you can do, and the Iliad introduces this really confusing scenario where Agamemnon has the power to take Briseis away from Achilles, but Achilles has the power to refuse to fight, which is not something you can do in modern day military, that that would be, you would be sent to prison. Well, there's a variety of bad things that could happen to you, one of which is being sent to prison if you refuse to fight, and so I never, I don't know if anybody fully understands why Achilles has certain powers but not other powers, or if he said, well, if you want Briseis, come and take her and see what happens, like everybody knows what would have happened. So it could be we need to advance the plot here. So in this situation, Achilles will not have the ability to keep this enslaved person, and Agamemnon will have the ability to take her. But yeah, I think to sum it up, I suppose I think that my perception of Agamemnon and just how dangerous it is to have a leader like that, very much shaped by Jonathan Shays' work, but again shaped by my own thinking about that topic, and it's kind of an unfortunate thing, but that's those scenarios continue to exist because war is so dangerous and so intense and not a time for debate, or you know, hey, hear me out. It's a time for action and following orders. If you've got the wrong person giving the orders, there's going to be a lot of problems, and you're kind of stuck there. You don't really, you know, if you're lower ranking, you just don't have any abilities to escape from that. And so I think that definitely it took time for me to come to it, but that shaped how I think about the Iliad, and how I think about Agamemnon in particular. Dr Rad 56:45 Like, those words really, I think, ring true. Whilst you're right, obviously, civilians have no comprehension of the kind of chain of command, and that sort of thing. Certainly, your words about the danger of erratic and unpredictable leaders in wartime certainly ring true, I think, around the world right now. Josh Cannon 57:03 Unfortunately, yeah. Dr Rad 57:04 Yeah, yeah. Dr G 57:06 Well, on that somber note, all right, without mentioning any names or particular places. All right. Thank you so much, Josh, for sharing your expertise and your experiences with us, because I think this is a way of better understanding what is happening at an individual level when it comes to things like combat, and even though we're talking about the Iliad and ancient Greek perspectives in this conversation. I think a lot of the ideas and concepts will translate really nicely into thinking about ancient Roman history as well, and obviously the Romans themselves took a lot of stock and value from what the Greeks had to say about this topic as well. So, thank you so much for sharing your knowledge. Josh Cannon 58:00 It was a real pleasure to speak with you, and to speak with you both, and to be a part of this. Like I said, I've been listening for a long time, and a big fan, so this is great. Thank you. Dr Rad 58:09 Oh, thank you. Dr G 58:34 Thanks for listening. If you'd like to support the podcast, you can find us on Patreon and Ko-Fi. We've also published two books on ancient Roman history, "Rex: The Seven Kings of Rome" examines the different literary accounts of the earliest rulers recorded in Roman history. "Your Cheeky Guide to the Roman Empire" is full of the sorts of stories the Romans wished you didn't know about them, and is guaranteed to make for interesting conversation. Thank you to all our Patreon supporters. We are truly humbled by your patronage. Transcribed by https://otter.ai