Introducing The Greek Myth Files
Several years ago, when I was contemplating what my professional life as a teacher/scholar at my university for the next decade or so, I realized that, despite all the work that I do researching what I love (spoiler: it’s Greek myth and storytelling), a fairly large part of my work had not been accessible to the public. To be sure, our textbook and translations were geared toward non-scholars, but a lot of what I publish is read by only a small group of equally trained scholars and unfortunate undergraduates who made the regrettable choice to sign up for one of my advanced myth courses. Anyways, one might reasonably question why I would get paid to write things that aren’t widely circulated. When compared to the work of someone who researches and writes on, say, the opioid epidemic or medical testing, my scholarly output looks less impactful and, if we’re to be honest, less important. I would rather say “less practical,” since I believe intellectual pursuits of all kinds are important and have relevance to the collective understanding of our world, but even so, I felt a deep urge to present something meaningful and accessible about the stories that the Greeks and later Romans told about the distant past.
To a large extent this urge started me on the path to MANTO. At the beginning, I simply wanted to create a curated website that would allow for the exploration of Greek myth on the landscape using the powers of GIS technology. That project is ongoing (and tied into MANTO), but I also realized that there was space out there for a podcast on Greek myth that was both based in careful study of the sources and accessible to a larger group of people. I’ve listened off and on to Let’s Talk about Myths, Baby and Myths and Legends, and I’ve found both worthwhile—the former for its upbeat and topical relevance, as well as its irreverence, and the latter for its wide-ranging narratives of world myth, which includes some stories from the Greek and Roman world. There are a lot of other Greek mythology podcasts, most of which are done by avid mythophiles retelling Greek myths in a conversational style, and there are more than one that feature people getting tipsy or drunk while telling stories. As much as I would have loved to get in on that on the ground floor, that market’s cornered, and so is the witty, jaunty retelling of myths. So, I had to find another angle.
As often happens, most of my best ideas occur when I’m sitting around a table with passionate and engaged students, and during one particular meeting of my research team “Putting Greek Myth on the Map,” we brainstormed about what kind of podcast it could be, and then it dawned on me: I’m very old, not very hip, and very out of tune with what the world wants. So, I created a one-credit exploratory class and had students sign up to help me figure out what was best. We wrote some scripts, sat around a table and read, and settled on our principles. We had a lot of fun reading funny retellings of the basic stories, but it just did not feel right. We had a lot more to say, and there were already plenty of podcasts that took that angle anyways. So we settled on this: a scholarly but accessible podcast on myth that was aimed not just at telling the stories (though that will happen, of course), but also exploring their relevance to their own culture, carefully scripted and having a overarching point. It also fit who I am: old, not very hip, and out of tune with what the world wants. But what I can do is exploit my 20 years of reading, thinking about and writing on the topic.
At any rate, I fortunately also lucked into having a student in a Latin class who was also interested in being a sound engineer. She worked for the university’s radio station, and she was eager to get some experience in editing and finalizing podcasts. We also have an incredible Theater and Dance department, and I knew some students with interests in voice acting, so we signed them up to help as well. So we had it all: an ambitious group of students, a pile of ideas, and a sound engineer. And then it happened: Covid-19. Some students were unable to finish their scripts, and we went into lockdown. Our plans to use the sound equipment at the radio station were scrapped. I had a Yeti microphone at home and a handy, just-big-enough closet to record in, but we had lost steam. Even so, we pivoted (a word that university faculty have heard over the past six months and have come to really hate) to a mini-season of four episodes, all focused on myths of disease, plagues, death and dying. One of our student writers completed a script on Demeter and Persephone, and I was pleased that we could use it for our third episode. Our voice actors stepped up and recorded some powerful readings of our texts. All in all, it was a good start.
Our goal has been to strike a balance between understanding the myths in their own context in a precise way while also showing the abiding relevance of these stories in other contexts, including our own. Here is a snippet from our second episode, which treats, in part, the story of Admetos, who could avoid an early death if someone else would take his place. He has the gall to ask his elderly parents if they would do him this favor, and it did not go well.
One of the great things about Greek myth is that it often confronts ethical choices in a sort of abstract setting, far removed from the emotional tension of the present. But the questions about whether the old should sacrifice themselves for the young has become all too real since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic. As cases in young people started to grow in Italy, doctors, without enough ventilators to go around, were forced to make an impossible choice. Who gets the machine, a 70-year old or a person in her 30s? In the city of hard-hit Bergamo, doctors were instructed not to put people over 70 on respirators so that the young could be saved. In an interview on NPR, Carlo Vitelli, a doctor in Italy, said, “If you have a 99-year-old patient, and you have a kid that needs to be intubated and you only have one ventilator, I mean, you’re not going to toss a coin.”
Doctors and ethicists have long debated how to conduct triage when many need medical care with limited supplies of doctors and equipment, and most states have published clear guidelines how such impossible choices can be made. For instance, the state of New York, which was hit hard by Covid-19, has a clear policy based on “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.” In the document (health.ny.gov) they consider whether “years of life saved” ought to be the primary decider of who gets treatment. Under such a policy, doctors would attempt to save the maximum number of years rather than the maximum number of patients. However, New York has rejected age as a factor and stated “ventilators should be allocated in a manner to maximize the number of survivors, and age should not be a primary factor in triage.” Late last month the US Civil Rights Offices also rejected the rationing of medical use based on age.
How we treat the old and vulnerable has come to the for in our national politics as well. President Trump, eager to get the country’s economy up and running, said that the country will have to make some difficult trade-offs to get the economy back into gear, meaning that we’d have to risk more infections to get the country back to work. After this statement, Dan Patrick, the Lieutenant Governor of Texas, took things to the logical end. On Fox news, he said, “No one reached out to me and said ‘As a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance on your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren?” To put it bluntly, governor Patrick is suggesting that the elderly—the most vulnerable to the Coronavirus—ought to be perfectly happy to risk their own lives for the sake of the young. Essentially, he’s saying that Pheres was being selfish for not sacrificing himself for his younger son.
Podcasts are labor intensive and require planning, writing, organizing readers, and editing. Anyone who is thinking about creating a podcast, I encourage you to read So You Want to Start a Podcast by Kristen Meinzer. She’s got a ton of experience and writes in a really engaging way. Our hope is to continue to drop a new episode once every two weeks. Blessedly I’m on leave from teaching this fall, so I have the time to write scripts every day. Coming this fall is a series on “What Greek Myth Is…and Is Not.” The first episode will consider: did the Greeks believe their myths. Small topic, that one.