You're Dead to Me - Pythagoras

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

In this episode, Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Edith Hall and comedian Desiree Burch to learn all about ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Pythagoras is famous in maths classes everywhere for his triangle theorem, but surprisingly little is known about his actual life, and his theorem was actually invented by Babylonian mathematicians centuries before he was born! Taking in his beliefs about reincarnation, his possible divine parentage, and the cult he might have started, this episode explores the myths and legends that grew up in the ancient world about Pythagoras’s life in the centuries after his death. Research by: Josh Rice Written by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow, Emma Nagouse and Greg Jenner Produced by: Emmie Rose Price-Goodfellow and Greg Jenner Audio Producer: Steve Hankey Senior Producer: Emma Nagouse

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey, gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. Hello and welcome to You're Dead to Me, the Radio 4 comedy podcast that takes history seriously. My name is Greg Jenner. I'm a public historian, author and broadcaster. And today, we are packing our pencil cases and protractors and hopping aboard the school bus back to ancient Greece for a maths lesson with Mr Triangle himself. No, not the rock, Pythagoras.

And to help us square our hypotenuses, whatever that is, we have two very special guests in History Corner. She's Professor of Classics at Durham University and a Fellow of the British Academy. She researches class, ethnicity and gender in classical texts, is an expert on ancient Greek theatre and philosophy. You might have read one of her many excellent books or heard her on any number of brilliant Radio 4 programmes, including Natalie Haynes Stands Up for the Classics and Great Lives. It's Professor Edith Hall. Welcome, Edith. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here to triangulate with you two. Oh, lovely joke. Look at that.

There's a lot of beautiful triangle puns I'm not going to be able to keep up with here. I'm going to have to decide what my angle is on this early. Look, I tried. I'm not born a dad. I just have to try to earn that level. Honorary dad pun. Yes. All right. Well, we've given away a little bit there, but in Comedy Corner, she barely needs an introduction. She's a comedian, actor, and writer.

You've seen her all over the telly on Taskmaster, Frankie Boyle's New World Order, The Horn Section, Neil Gaiman's Sandman. You'll know her from any number of podcasts, including our own. She's your dead-to-me royalty. It's Desiree Birch. Welcome back, Desiree. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. This is where I get all of my learning done, Greg. So thank you guys for inviting me back so I can understand the man behind the maths,

or I guess the one math. It was mostly just the geometry, right? Slightly rare one, this one. You pitched Pythagoras to us. Well, yes, simply because I remember doing an educational show about Zora Neale Hurston, where she was referencing Pythagoras. And I was just like, there's like he's around a lot. And I guess when you're involved in triangles and like all these magical things, you're around a lot. But I don't know enough about who commits their lives to doing something like this. So I was just like, I heard he was bonkers. Let's find out together.

All right. Well, I think you're going to find some pretty bonkers stuff today. Fantastic. There's some definite kooky things. So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing what our lovely listener at home might know about today's subject. And I'm going to bet most of you know Pythagoras as a man,

a man in STEM, as we would say in modern parlance. We all had to memorize his theorem about triangles and schools. Say it with me now. A squared plus B squared. No, A squared plus B squared equals C squared. He's the muse of the hypotenuse, the OG try guy. But what about his actual life story? That's a lot less well known. There aren't any Pythagoras movies. Well, he does feature in Assassin's Creed Odyssey as one of the drivers of the story to make you go on a quest to find... And it's Pythagoras, I guess. I don't know. My boyfriend's Cypriot and he's like, you're still saying it wrong. And no matter how many times I try to

evolve it, he's like, no, it's still wrong. But anyway, he did help me go on a quest to find out theorems or something. I don't know. I just enjoy playing the video game. That's the other thing I know about him. That's our first ever intervention in the So What Do You Know, which I like. A fact check from a comedian in the So What Do You Know. Hooray. Excellent.

Well done, Desiree. You're right. He is in that game. Although Pythagoras, I don't know how to pronounce it. I mean, the expert in the room. Pythagoras is pretty good. Pythagoras. Pythagoras.

Okay. I'm just going to do it with epic. Pythagoras. Did I do the hands? You did the room. Pythagoras is pretty good. Pythagoras. I'm just going to do it with epic. Pythagoras. Did I do the hands? You did the hands. So the key question for today is who is the man behind the triangles? What were his big philosophical ideas? Because he's a philosopher too. And why was he so obsessed with beans? My boyfriend's also obsessed with beans. That's so strange. I don't know if that's a Mediterranean thing. I mean, my boyfriend loves beans. I'll be surprised if it's the same reason, but let's find out. Okay, Edith, let's start the podcast then. When and where was Pythagoras, as we're now deciding to call him, where was he born? Okay, so let's imagine that we're in the eastern Aegean Sea

off the southwest corner of what's now Turkey. We're in huge cultural contact with everything in the eastern Mediterranean. We're in a very cosmopolitan environment. We're actually in the party island of Samos. It's not now held to be one of the Greek party islands, but it was then. It had amazing fish. It has still the most amazing wine. And this little boy is born, maybe about 570, but we can't be absolutely exact. That's exactly the point in time when what they call the Ionian philosophers, because that strip of Western Turkey is called Ionia, were inventing philosophy. They were inventing rational medicine.

They were inventing physics. They were doing all kinds of things where they're trying to understand the world without God in it. For the very first time, we know very little about his childhood. He certainly travelled around, possibly to Egypt. He had several different teachers and contacts. He did go back to Samoth, got into some kind of political trouble and then went off to Croton, which was in Greek southern Italy. Southern Italy being colonised by the Greeks.

He's on the toe of the boot and there he sets up whatever we are to make of his philosophical school. And he dies in 480 BCE, which is sort of a classic year in Greek history because that's the era of, you know, big battles.

A lot happens in 480 BCE. The Persians are being kicked out of Greece, that kind of thing. So Marathon and Salamis, which we've done episodes about. I doubt if he lived that long. That gives him 90 years.

And given all these different traditions that we'll go on to later, the ancients had a great thing about longevity. If somebody was quite a heroic figure, they often claimed he'd lived preternaturally long. I very much doubt if he was either born as early as 570 or lived all the way to 480. So living for 90 years at that point in history

was not a thing that people wanted to do? Well, actually, some did, weirdly. If you survived to like 25... Yes. Then you might make it all the way to 90. But most people didn't make it to 24 now. But they collected traditions about all the very, very old men, right? And Sophocles, for example, the great creature, Didion,

definitely lived to nearly 90. He actually did. So people who were writing about other ones wanted to make them compete with that. And obviously the Mediterranean diet is a huge... It's the lovely fish on Samos. Pulses, pulses, beans. Beans, oh. Fasolacchia.

Okay. So we've already killed him off for ATVCA. So the episode's already done. I guess we just go home now. That was quick. No, actually, really, we're going to start again. This isn't really a biography. This is a kind of cultural history of an idea of a man.

Do we have biographies of him? I mean, Iamblichus is a name that I'm vaguely aware of as a historian. So what do we know? There are two surviving, serious, substantial biographies of him, and they're by people who were in much, much, much later antiquities, sort of Roman Empire period Greek philosophers who were really Platonists. They were really into Plato because Plato took a lot of his ideas from Pythagoras. So they wrote too.

But we also have much more scurrilous ones. There's a very sensational one by a chap called Diogenes Laertius, which is full of the scandal things about sex and parties and that kind of thing. It's good stuff. I'm so glad there's sex in parties, you guys. It's not just about math. You can keep listening.

And there was a chap called Heraclides Ponticus, which is one of those stupid classicist ways of saying somebody from the Pontus from the Black Sea, who was brought up in such a cold place, right, that he just found this whole idea of the sunny climes of South Italy

and Samos really intriguing. So I think he was actually building a sort of fantasy biography about this southern charmer. So wait, what are people basing their biographies on if there's nobody who at the time was writing about him or the records were no longer, like, how do you write a biography based on like, oh, my grandpa once told me the story about because people were generating stories very soon after his death

so even during his own lifetime there's another poet called Xenophanes who's really rude because he's obviously a rival right

but also the comic theatre is everything and you will relate to this so there were lots of comedies about mad philosophers

because people found them inherently funny. A famous one is by Aristophanes called The Cloud. It's about Socrates where he's going around in a basket. We haven't got any about Pythagoras but we know they existed. Lots of funny stories arose about them especially because of his theory of metempsychosis which is that when you die your soul leaves and is reborn into another body, which reminds people a lot of some ideas in Hinduism, reincarnation. So that particular

aspect of whatever went on in his very mysterious cult, sect, whatever it is we're going to talk about, attracted lots and lots of very weird stories and people like to make great jokes about it. They've cracked jokes a lot in antiquity about being reborn in a pig or a duck, you know, all the obvious kind of things. So people went to the theatre who knew nothing about Pythagoras and whatever the comedians had done to him to make him as bonkers as they possibly could, got into the public discourse. And then centuries later, that's the story that somehow starts masquerading as serious biographical fact. Now, just imagine if the stuff that you say in your comedy shows

on anybody is the only source in 2,000 years' time. Yeah, I mean, the up and the downsides. When you do comedy, your work disappears. It's ephemeral. It goes into people's brains or out of their ears they laugh they forget it whatever or it goes into the cultural consciousness and suddenly it's no longer a joke suddenly people are actually doing the thing that you were being satirical about and you're like oh i've ruined everything so i think you need to i think you start to need taking your my clown job seriously epistemological responsibilities

wow a bit more seriously. Hardcore stuff. All right. So Pythagoras, let's start with the myths of his birth. Do you want to guess who his dad may have been, Desiree? The dean of his school. No, I'm sure his dad was like, I don't know. I feel like it's always like he was a poor farmer or a poor something.

And that's why the kid goes so far to like overcompensate and be like, I've created maths or something. So I'm guessing his father was a poor worker of some kind. Complete opposite. He was a rich, he was like the mayor of the town. The sun god. Wait, what? He was the sun god. Apollo, god of the sun.

Oh, okay. Yep. Missed that one by a country mile. Edith, this feels maybe slightly untrue, but what? Well, actually, he was the son of a salesman called Mnysarchos, which is just a fairly common ancient name. He might have been a gem engraver or somebody who both engraved and sold gems. Semi-tachyloa bourgeoisie.

Yeah. You know? Yeah. Semi-tachyloa bourgeoisie. Yeah. You know? Semi-tachyloa bourgeoisie is amazing. Yeah. Get a tattoo of that on your arm. He's called Puthagoras, which is a perfectly,

you know, it's not a particularly remarkable name because people have names with bits of gods in them. But the sun, Apollo, he gets identified with the sun quite early on, Helios. Right.

He is Pythian Apollo. He's the Apollo of the Pythian on, Helios, right? He is a Pythian Apollo. He's the Apollo of the Pythian Oracle, which was a snake. It's actually like Python originally. Python, yeah. But it's the Pythian Oracle. And people who knew nothing at all about him, they have this thing called gnomon omen, which means that people somehow life is connected with their name.

They used to do name interpretation of history. So a story arose that his mum and dad, when they wanted a baby, had gone off to the Pythian Oracle and asked about having a baby. And so then a myth starts up because there's so many myths

about people both having, Heracles has both Zeus as a dad and he's got a bloke as a dad, a fiction as a dad. So he could have two dads. Who was a bartender. He could have two dads. I mean, it's like the baby Jesus. You know, he's got a bloke as a damn fiction. He could have two dads. Who was a bartender. He could have two dads. It's like the baby Jesus.

He's got Joseph the carpenter and he's got the three in one triune top god. He's got two dads. So there's a two dad thing. On top of that though, the Greeks associated sun worship with barbarian countries. Like the Egyptians, the Persians.

No, everywhere. Barbarian just means everybody was a Greek. Everybody else. Barbarian just means going bar, bar, bar. Yeah, it just means the gavel. They just went bar, bar, bar, bar, bar. Their words don't mean anything to God. So they could have equally been like the gobbledygooks.

Yeah, exactly. Wow. But the point is that that actually is a reflection of the idea that he was a bit exotic, a bit other, that he got picked up knowledge in Egypt or from the Phoenicians in the Levant or from the Persian Zoroastrians who did worship, you know, fire and the light,

this kind of thing. So it's part of this exotic. He's not quite properly Greek. Just from his name. Yeah. There's no other proof that he's gone to the... Because I feel like I'd heard that he'd had some, like, Egyptian or, like, study or something like that.

But is that just from the name? No, it's not just. Oh, OK. He may well have gone on the Orphics, which is another sect, right? The Orphics. They absolutely did worship the sun. So he's over on the west coast of Italy. You know, you're going to go out and look at glorious sunrises.

So we have this story that Pythagoras, when he's born, there's a sort of prophecy that your wife will give birth to a child that will surpass all humans in all time in beauty and in wisdom. He's going to be hot, he's going to be wise, he's going to be smart, he's going to be gorgeous. He's going to be perfect, right? Well, in fact, one of the more respectable sources is a chap called De Caiacus, who was a student of Aristotle. I mean, he was a serious philosopher. And he said that he was remarkable for his good looks, because we all know that most geeky people are most philosophers you know i have to say that most of my colleagues in

philosophy are not what i would call a hottie um they're thotties dk arcus said he was very tall of noble stature his voice his character and every other aspect were marked by an exceptional degree of charm and embellishment. He always wore white. He wore white trousers underneath a white gown, apparently, which is kind of oriental. It's very Persian, isn't it? Inverted commas, yeah. White trousers and a white gown. He had a golden thigh.

They say he had a golden thigh, which is a little bit suspect. Was that just a trick for him to show people? I think so. I mean, because if you want to see my thigh, I've got to pull down these trousers under my tunic and major look. Very, very interesting. Golden thigh is my favourite Bond theme. It's from Tina Turner. Yep.

Golden thigh. I found his weakness. Yes. And he also went around with a gold crown. But, you know, people have weird headgear in antiquity. Like Pericles always wore his hoplite, you know, his heavy-armed helmet. I mean, I always wear this headband, but, but like that wasn't, it's not the same. Like, when did he cultivate this?

Because you've told me now that he had a cult and also he was hot, which helps if you're going to run a cult. I guess nobody knows like at what point the sociopathy started to develop. If this is what he's doing, like he's cultiv a whole, like, there's the sun god story. I'm only in white. I've got this crown. Look at my golden thigh. No, but really look really closely.

What do the biographers say about how much of this was like him completely believing his own delusion versus like, you know, working an angle? Well, they're split on this. As they are about a lot of things. So one lot say that he was like a freedom fighting hero who had to leave Samos because he spoke up for freedom of speech. So he was driven off to Italy.

Others say that as soon as he got to Italy, he set up trying to be a tyrant himself. Yeah. Now, if you want to be a tyrant yourself, you do want to create mystique. You do want to have, you're going to make yourself look very beautiful. But you're also going to develop weird things that people will talk about because all news is good news if you're trying to set up a tyranny. You've got to have a shtick, right? Wow. Boris Johnson had the hair.

Yes. This is nuts. And he had no other, apparently, source of income. Whatever happened to the salesman? We don't know. I mean, he had to get his disciples to pay, convert people to join the sect. That's the problem with Apollo. He's a deadbeat dad.

Yeah, yeah. He's like, I gave you the son. Yeah. What do you want? He is a deadbeat dad of so many children by mortal maidens. Really? Well, I guess if he's that hot, everybody's like, I would love the son, the son's son's son. The son's son sun's, sun. The sun, sun, sun.

Yeah. But I'm just trying to find a way through what we know about his life and what we know after his life. We do think he travels and we think he's traveling to two major cultures, the Persian world, the Egyptian world. Absolutely. All the ancient commentators and biographers come out with this. Even then, I have to say, this is a normal thing that they do. They're writing about any of their sages that they have to go off to their trips to Egypt and their trips to Persia. But he will definitely, if you're born in Samos, you absolutely will have gone to the Persians' mainland.

And if you're interested in maths or geometry, you will definitely have gone to Egypt. Even some rumors, some people have said that he was actually North African. Oh, yeah. That's what I heard from the Zora Neale Hurston show that she was saying that Pythagoras was African, of African descent. Well, it's possible. So Thales, who's the first real philosopher, scientist, same kind of time, he was half Phoenician. Now that means he's from the Levant, which means he may have been very Lebanese. There's lots and lots of, you know,

interchanging between the Levant and Egypt and all the rest of it. We never know exactly what colour anybody was in the ancient Eastern Mediterranean. That is the honest truth. Depends on the time of year. That's all my Greek friends say. But I think he's a brilliant example of the way that the ancient Greeks were the

conduit for there wasn't a Greek miracle, there was an Eastern Mediterranean and North African miracle. But it came through mainly through the texts of the Greeks. We're talking about a really synthetic, exciting, hybrid intellectual milieu. And that is only because the Greeks, they were in contact with more than other people because they colonized on seaboards. So they tended to meet more people. So they got to be the ones who said, these are our ideas. Because we've collected them and we put them down to give them to you.

So they're ours. You've got it. Oh, beautiful. That can't be the beginning of that idea, can it? Okay, understood. Yeah, so we have this idea that Antiphon, the Greek writer, says that Pythagoras learned to speak Egyptian from the pharaoh himself. Amasis, the second.

Amasis, the second, yeah. And then even maybe he's training with Zoroaster himself, the Zoroaster, the kind of great. This is Greek comedy. Somebody did a Greek comedy set at the court of Amasis and Zoroaster turned up and saying, I see the truth and the lie. I mean, the Greeks found the Persian religion incredibly funny.

I mean, I don't know anything about Zoroastrianism except for Freddie Mercury and not eating, I think, tubers or something. Well, he was Zoroastrian, but I absolutely smell a comedy where we're at the court of a mace, so everybody can wear weird Egyptian costumes. We know that they love to dress up as barbarians in their theatre. Pythagoras is going to turn up and be this comic figure, and then Zoroaster's going to come along,

and they're going to have a... It's a comedy. So were the Greeks basically like, Pythagoras, what a genius. And then he would walk away and they're like, oh, yeah. I mean, all through ancient Greek philosophy, you get complaints from Plato, from Socrates, from Aristotle, that people just laugh at philosophers with very good reason. I mean, with very good reason. If you're engaging with the fine detail of everyday life and trying to earn a living and somebody's going on along and saying things like do we exist yeah you know you want

to say give me a break yeah i don't you know i exist enough to feel hungry yes okay so so he's having a wonderful gap year in persia and egypt possibly and people back home are like oh did you go find yourself pythagoras yeah exactly and he comes back wearing white being like, I am a golden god. And people are flinging their bodies at him apparently. Look at my golden thigh. What else do we know about this mystical grand tour, Edith? I mean, there's the idea of him establishing a school, isn't there? Well, he does establish something in Italy.

I think that's something we can be sure of. What all the scholars argue about is whether it is a religious mystery sect or a very high and esoteric but very intellectual sort of rational philosophical school. And in fact, that route continues to this day. I can promise you I have seen bar brawls at philosophy conferences. I would love to see that. Does someone just throw their IPA like in your face? I challenge you. I think the distinction may be slightly false one though

because all ancient philosophers grouped together according to their ideas. So even Aristotle is the most rational of all of them. Had his Lyceum with its own little sort of high table culture and little rituals. And this school that he sets up, it's named after a famous shape. Do you want to guess what it is?

Is it the triangle? It is not, which is an absolute... What? The circle? The dodecahedron? What are we doing here? What? The semicircle. He squandered his time. A semicircle? That's not even a shape anybody cares about. Like in the top five shapes, that comes up on no one's list.

Think of a sexy shape. Half a circle. Nope. Beer gut. Nope. Not the shape. What are you talking about? He missed the brand synergy there, Edith, didn't he?

Because the triangle was right there. They're like semicircles. That may have been to do with. Okay. So think of the ancient Greek theater. Yeah. Yes. Right.

So he's talking to an audience of his disciples. In the amphitheater. If you had eyes on the back of your head, you could also talk to them in a circle. Well, didn't Pythagoras have eyes in the back of his head? I heard he got that after the thigh. Not just a triangle nerd, not just a mystic philosopher, not just a sort of esoteric golden-thighed wonder beast with Pythagorabs, because we've said he's hot. Shredded. He's also a sports instructor. So they say.

He also taught PE. Do you want to guess who he may be training? Wait, who? Is he training famous people? Is he training famous Olympians? He is. I don't know any famous Olympians because Marathon wasn't an Olympian. He's just a guy who ran and died.

I don't know the names of famous Olympians. No, no, no. The important thing is that he chose a very small man called Eurimenes. Okay. And he chose him so that once he trained him, he then beat all the bigger guys. He's the Lionel Messi of ancient athletics. Doing it for small men everywhere. Come on.

Exactly. The little goat who beats all these enormous guys. And I'm sure he did that deliberately. At which sports? Like which events? Well, all the standard track and field. Okay, wow. Including wrestling, presumably.

I mean, I guess I can see the little guy being fast. No, the little guy wouldn't have wrestled. There was a famous strongman called Milo of Croton. It was a local guy. He found this guy who we know from other authors did things like carry a fully grown adult bull around on his shoulders in training. I mean, he may have even trained Milo to do that, right? He might have said, can you lift that bull on your shoulders, right? But that, again, it's not as weird as it looks

because Socrates is always going off to the polyester, to the gymnasium to talk to handsome young philosophers who've just finished working out. Of course he was. Yeah, they really thought that you could only think properly if you kept your body well. So he's an ascetic as well. So ascetic, we mean he's stripping himself of all the kind of good things in life.

He's punishing himself almost. Well, he's trying to control his physical desires. Okay. Is that coming from the workout thing? Because a lot of people get super into a workout mode and then they're like, oh man, you got to do thing. You got to do no nut November. And you can, you know, no fap, no fap. Yeah, exactly. You know, so like I can see that happening for people who are like, I really want to get my delts like perfectly. And I, now

I realize it has to be beating myself with sticks and no. That is also though, just an exaggeration of a continuing strand in ancient philosophy that if you were going to devote yourself to thinking about the good life, and I mean the virtuous life and all the rest of it, then you do not want to be that drunk, sybarite, sybarite is actually another city in southern Italy, where they did nothing but feast and have sex all day and every day. Sounds awful. Terrible. Definitely want to do that for your own moral well-being. Some sources say that he told the athletes to eat lots of meat and stop eating figs, because figs were a luxury.

They're very sweet. And cheese as well. Cut out the cheese. Cut out the cheese, cut out the figs, eat more meat. Yeah, that's the Neolithic diet or something. Oh yeah, the paleo. Paleo, that's what that one is. But more sources say that he was actually the first really true vegetarian.

He absolutely abhorred the shedding of blood, either in violence between humans or against animals, and that he wanted people to be vegetarians. That's clear in at least two of the later biographies. And actually, Ovid, the great Roman poet's poem Metamorphoses, he actually has Pythagoras commanding the human race not to grow fat by stuffing itself with another body, that the human body should not have animal bodies in it. It's very powerful stuff. Yeah. Why is there not a Pythagorean diet out there? Because that would

sell. In the 19th century, vegetarians were called Pythagoreans. Yeah. He was the world's most famous vegetarian until, unfortunately, Hitler probably, actually. But if you were a veggie in the 19th century, you were a Pythagorean. Oh, my goodness. He also had another amazing line. Was it guts inside of guts? Yeah. His moral opposition to eating meat, he said, is disgusting to have guts inside of guts. Yeah, that's hip hop. That's like babies having babies to have guts inside of guts. That's hip hop.

That's like babies having babies. Guts inside of guts. We can't have it. It's no good. But that would be not just odd and funny to ancient Greeks, but actually frightening and disturbing because of the entire economy is based on this. And the entire traditional religion is based on animal sacrifice. So that would have been seen as disturbing to the social compact. So how much of this demonizing or the like sort of, ha ha ha, he's a weirdo, but also his ideas are so counter to our economy and our society that we have to kind of make him crazy and foolish.

You know, just as like Jesus would have been a challenge to capitalism. Do you know what I mean? Like, was he too challenging for Greek? I think so. Yeah, I think so. And especially it's traditional religion, because traditional religion is what holds the city state together. You worship these gods and you come together with these feasts for these animal sacrifices.

So to repudiate that is a very big deal. And he didn't have any qualms. Like, he did this easily. Like, he didn't struggle. We don't have any, like he did this easily. Like he didn't struggle. We don't have any evidence of him being like, oh, I don't know. And I'm trying to formulate this thing. He just like, this is right. The theorem came to me in a dream or from God.

And I cannot tell you what went on inside his head. We don't have that. All I knew, he just said he was a vegetarian and actually went and fried huge steaks in secret in the semicircle. We do actually have a story later saying he does sacrifice 100 oxen. Yes, we do. So literally, we've just said, this is the guy who's like, don't sacrifice 100 oxen. And then in a different story, it's like, I'm going to sacrifice 100 bull. He said, don't eat meat.

And then he's like, but how about 100 meat? That's fine. So there's definitely a tension in terms of how he's being spoken about by those who are clearly for or against, or maybe just fascinated or confused by him. The idea of him as a radical, as a dangerous radical is quite exciting, because that's what Socrates

was, right? I would say it's subversive. Subversive, okay. I would say it's subversive. You can be radical, usually implies sort of leftish. You can be a really right wing subversive. OK, all right. And the thing that ultimately we do not know, but the idea is that he travels to Crotona in southern Italy,

either to escape from a tyrant or to become a tyrant. I love how those two things are oppositional. And yet somehow they sort of make sense. Well, they could easily, they could really easily be true. It was the age of tyrants. You know, the cities outside mainland Greece were almost all tyrannies. In fact, all of the ones in mainland Greece,

it's the age of tyrants. This is exactly what it is. They had replaced hereditary kings. And so you've got a new thing where the smartest, richest guy in the city could just sort of tell everybody to bring him in on a wave of popular support. And then he could get really nasty afterwards.

So it's perfectly possible that he stood up to somebody trying to do that in his island but had absolutely every intention of doing exactly that himself when he got to Italy. Perfectly possible. So when he went to Italy, he was also escaping a tyrant to become a tyrant, but he was fleeing. He wasn't just like, oh, let me go and check it out over here. I think that's likely. Okay, okay, cool.

And you know, escaping a tyrant means escaping certain and unpleasant death. Yes, yes. Because you can't just keep you around and be like, boo, for shame. It's like no public hanging. So Edith, the story is that he's fled a tyrant, shown up in Crotona in Italy,

and immediately he's like, actually, I quite fancy being a tyrant over here. So we've got Porphyry, who's one of his biographers, tells us things go a bit wrong. Pythagoras gets into political trouble. Pythagoras, one of his students is called Cylon. Cylon realises that he's actually aiming at political power as well as just being the top brain in the room.

He wants to be the top man in the room. And he resists him. And then there's a lot of fighting. And Pythagoras, who's actually, I think, probably quite a coward, goes and hides in a temple of the Muses, because the Muses are in charge not just of music, and he was very interested in music, but actually of maths and astronomy and all that kind of thing. And he either dies there because he doesn't eat for 40 days, And he either dies there because he doesn't eat for 40 days, or Kylan sets fire to the temple and burns him out, or he dies by suicide later on.

It's all very, very unclear what exactly happened. Either of those two stories seems to me a bit difficult if you're 90. Yes, you're right. We have to revise down the age probably. Because you can't get chased anywhere. I'll be asleep by then. It's fine. So Kylon, his student, sees through the sort of persona and is challenging him or is being like essentially runs him into the Temple of the Muses, where I guess he can't commit any violence in the Temple of the Muses.

But also we can say Pythagoras was a coward, but he's also a vegetarian who doesn't like violence. So he's not going to get into a scrap match with Cylon. Well, there's another story that he didn't actually run into the Temple of the Muses, but he ran into a field of beans. Yes, we'll get to that. This is a crucial bean fact we'll come to. I want to come back to Cylon, though, because there is an element of the story where Cylon

wants to be tutored by Pythagoras. Pythagoras rejects him. Oh, this is going in the film. Basically, because he's rejected, that's his sort of animation to be like, oh, I see through you. And you could have been my muse, but instead. Yeah, that's the plot of The Incredibles. Syndrome is rejected as a boy by Mr. Incredible and then becomes the villain. Yeah, this is every villain like ever created.

It's just like if you had only not rejected this poor person who, you know, had their feelings hurt. Yeah. But you can't have any ancient Greek story without at least one revenge motive. I mean, you know,

it had to go in. It had to go in. Someone's got to feel vengeful if it's a Greek story. So, this is the first radio ad you can smell the new cinnabon pull apart only at wendy's it's ooey gooey and just five bucks with a small coffee all day long taxes extra at participating wendy's until may 5th terms and conditions apply pythagoras is is killed by kylon and his men, either burned alive, dies by suicide,

starves to death in a temple, or bean-related death. Pythagoras is the original Mr. Bean, just as funny, because... Not silent enough. Not silent enough. If he'd only been chased by a bee forever, this would be a different story. Do you want to guess how the beans end up killing him

or being responsible for Pythagoras' death in this story? Okay, because we mentioned the beans before. Does he like beans because he's a vegetarian or not like beans? This is good thinking. Because of reasons that would befit Pythagoras, you know? Well, do you remember Edith mentioned metempsychosis earlier? Wait, was that to do with the reincarnation? It was.

That metempsychosis. Okay. Metempsychosis literally just means movement of the soul. Transition of the soul from one thing to another. So did he think that beans had a soul? He may have done. But why only beans? Like, why don't cabbages have a soul?

That's a very good question. They also, you know, pomegranates. Different. I mean, I don't think he thought that beans had souls, but some scholars do think that he extended the metempsychosis idea to the vegetable world, to flora as well as fauna. So then he starved because he's like, there's literally nothing I can eat because it's all alive. The story goes that he's been chased by C Kylon's men and he gets to a bean field and he stops running because he doesn't want to trample the beans because he believes they're the souls of his dead friends reincarnated as beans. So the. Oh, OK. So he doesn't want to eat them because the beans are people. He doesn't want to trample them. It's not even eating. He doesn't want to run through them.

Couldn't he run around them? Where was the field? Surely it had a boundary around the field. Couldn't he have been like, I'll just make a sharp left and run that way? What's really interesting to me, though, is that he seems to have claimed to know what his friends became reincarnated as. Now, it's one thing to believe in reincarnation. It's another to actually know that that bean is your mate Fred you used to go to the pub with. What his daddy's son got it. There's another friend got reincarnated as a puppy. And he saw this puppy being beaten by its owner. And he went in and stopped it.

Not because he was against puppy abuse. Yeah, which is why most people would be like, you're beating a helpless puppy. Because it was his friend being beaten in the form of the puppy. So next to that friend, there was a dog just being punched in the throat. And he was like, I don't care. But this one, this one is my friend. This is my friend.

Okay. I wanted to get the dog theme in there for reasons that will become clear later. Oh my, there's more? So was he the only one at that time to be talking about reincarnation? And everyone was like, hilarious. And then he started, it sounds like a cult around reincarnation or math or all of it. The idea of reincarnation in another body is definitely not really attested before him in the Greek world. No, no, no, no.

So that's Pythagoras. He kind of cornered that USP. Yeah. I mean, we've already covered so, so much, but Edith, can we talk about Pythagoras, the philosopher in terms of proper philosophy? And I guess the problem for us is he doesn't really write anything down in his lifetime. So we're reliant on the people who come after. The comedians. To tell your story. Everyone, write your life story now.

Do not leave it to us. We will screw it up. Desiree will ruin you. Yeah, absolutely. Just because it's hilarious. Yeah, so what do we know of his philosophical position? Other than metempsychosis, I guess, which is his big thing? Yes. But the metempsychosis rests on something bigger, which is the dualism of soul and body.

This is a very specific idea that the body is material and absolutely corrupt and not very interesting. And that's why you have to sit on your desires because they're animal. What makes humans different is that we've got this soul. The body is a prison. This is why the Platonists, the Neo-Platonists, the Christians liked so much this whole idea that there is a soul that is separate from the body and that actually everything physical is not particularly nice.

But the Greeks before that, there was no separation of soul and body? Well, there was, but it was considered absolutely tragic. So the souls in Hades of the dead, it's miserable. Achilles says it would be better to be a slave alive, right? These guys said, no, no, no, no, no. The material world is terrible. There's this wonderful world of ideal forms and spirits and souls. And that is the perfect world.

So it's actually a complete inversion that we inherit in like the Christian idea of heaven. The other big thing is that he was deep into music and maths. And actually, I think some of his ideas there were incredibly important that we don't fully understand them. So it wasn't just geometry. He worked out this business about perfect fourths and perfect fifths and octaves and realize that there's something musical about mathematical harmony yeah um and we we know this from other ancient mathematicians and everything he did make some big propositions that were really important it's just we're not quite sure what so he was a super super wicked hot totally shredded like cult leader, golden crown, golden thigh, playing a guitar because he's into music and math and philosophy.

Like, I'm super into this guy. Well, Apollo is the god of, importantly, the kithara, which is the same word as guitar, eventually. So it's a harp. It's a stringed instrument. And on a stringed instrument, you can see how the mathematical things work out much more easily than you can playing a pipe or something. So although he isn't usually presented as actually a harp player, I think there is that kind of connection.

Yeah, I mean, as a heavy metal fan, Pythagoras for me, it's the Iron Maiden double guitar harmony solos. That's Pythagoras, right? That's him at his absolute best. So I have to say, we're on page nine of the script and we are just about touching on triangles and maths. We only just get, this gets way, if they only taught me this for the first week of geometry, I would listen for the rest of the year,

being like, this stuff is so meta, what? Desiree, do you remember what Pythagoras' theorem is for triangles? A squared plus B squared equals C squared as a right triangle. Some of the squares of the two sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Yeah, very good. Yeah, a GCC maths textbook there for you. So obvious question. Do you know who invented Pythagoras' theorem? Oh, well, I'm guessing based on the question, probably not. I mean, I don't know. I'm guessing some Egyptians or Persians where he went to go study it. And then he, like other Greeks, went, I invented this because you don't know those people.

So I invented it. Yeah, you're absolutely right. The Babylonians, as far as we can tell, the Babylonians. They were the ones who were there before the Persians. Yeah. They're the really, really old ones. This was worked out pretty early on when humans started building. It's something you needed to do if you're going to be a good stone.

when humans started building. Yes. It's something you needed to do if you're going to be a good stone mason. I mean, I guess Egypt figured out the pyramids and other things based on that. They're pretty triangular. Yes, exactly. And I'm sure they weren't the first

to maybe be building in that way. So I guess this is old news. Okay. So, yes, we've definitely got evidence of Pythagorean ideas in pre-Pythagoras by several centuries, back with at least the Babylonians. So obvious question then, Edith,

is he an absolute plagiarist and chancer? Or should we take Pythagoras seriously as someone who perfected ideas, who received knowledge and then built upon it? I'd go further. I would say that we could call him the father of geometry. Not because he was the first to do it, but because he's the first to make it a separate study area of science.

Is he before Euclid? Is he pre-Euclid then? Yeah, way, way, way, way, way. Hundreds of years. So Euclidean geometry is like the thing you have to study at university if you want to be a physicist. So it's a matter of not just doing it in practice while you're building buildings.

This is what the Babylonians had to invent it so they could, you know, put down paving stones. But turning it into what the Greeks called a techne. We have that word in technical college, like a techne is music or it's geometry or it's philosophy or it's poetry or it's visual arts. So I think he turns it into a distinct area of study and promulgates different theories, including this. It doesn't really matter where he got it from if he's sort of founding the discipline. He's clearly far too, he thinks he's far too smart to actually go and build a building.

He's not going to do anything with his hands, is he? I've proven the theory. My work here is done. Well, I mean, he might actually shed some blood if he did that, and that is completely to his being. So let others do that. He might scratches golden thigh no I was thinking a chisel

you know the chisel he hammers the chisel and it goes down on his knuckles and spares the blood spurts out and then he's like oh no my soul

my life force I'm dying the man who invented triangle theory didn't really invent triangle theory he actually was very important in the musical theory

so he probably should have played the triangle but he doesn't. He may well have done. There was such an instrument. Was there? Yeah. Oh, good.

All right. I could take you to the British Museum right now and show you a vase looted from Greece. Sorry. Yeah, okay. With a lady playing an ancient Greek costume on an ancient Greek pot playing a triangle. Amazing.

I mean, and I assume they play that because it makes a better sound than a semicircle. Oh, definitely. Yeah, that's good. The story goes that his musical theory comes about from an interaction with a blacksmith. Is that right? Yeah, all ancient philosophers go and hear a blacksmith.

I just have to say it's one of those things. It's a bit like revenge, right? Yeah, and he heard this clanging, the sounds coming out of the forge, and he split those somehow into all. He heard lots of different reverberations, which meant that he realized that the chords split in certain ways. It's not explained exactly how this goes on, but that is part of the story. So Newton got hit by an apple.

He discovers gravity. Pythagoras walks by a blacksmith and he discovers the mathematics behind music from hearing a ting, ting, ting. But I love this. As a heavy metal fan, famously heavy metal. Heavy metal. Heavy metal comes out of Sheffield and Birmingham because of the industrial forges of the sort of, you know, Ozzy Osbourne is like listening to metal being smashed into metal. I love the idea that the origins of musical theory

starts with an anvil, with a hammer on an anvil, and Pythagoras going, hang on a second, that's an octave. I think of Motown. Okay. Because this is factory noises, but it's this insistent rhythm. Okay, so he is both metal and the father of soul. What? I mean, wearing a white suit and a gold crown.

Yes, he is. Well, he's not just father of soul. You know, he is a soul. Oh, that's right. And his soul transmigrates. That's true. Wow. So he's done quite a bit for the cultural and scientific or mathematic philosophical consciousness.

Okay. Wow. I think we're back on board with Pythagoras. There was a spell where we were thinking this guy sounds like an absolute fraud. But actually, I think we're back on board with Pythagoras. There was a spell where we were thinking, this guy sounds like an absolute fraud. But actually, I think we're back on board. We're back on. I have to ask Desiree,

what would you want to be reincarnated as? I mean, even if people are going to pee on me and that's a bad way to start and teenagers are going to carve their names into me, I would like to be reincarnated as a tree. And it would be cool to be in a place to provide shade and to be a place where provide shade and to be a place where people gather and to witness a lot of things happen over because they live for a long time like

i remember going to see sequoias in america and i'm like all of these trees are older than our whole concept of of being a nation yeah and they've seen it all come and go and that's kind of amazing beautiful yeah oh yeah but yeah i shouldn't have started with even if people pee on me. But you know, that is a consequence of being a tree is people are going to do stuff. I thought you were going to say a bus shelter. That's where most of the peeing happens in my community. So, Edith,

we've got Pythagoras, the cult leader. Do we know what's happening in the cult? Like, you said mystical, you said religious, you said philosophical. Are there rules? Are there initiation ceremonies? Do you have to give them all your money and renounce all of your family and friends and drink any flavor? And sleep with Pythagoras? Obviously. Yes. Yes. Well, it's interesting that he did say goods should be held in common. Now it's more, it's more attractive to say goods should be held in common.

Goods should be held in my house. In my common. Yep, exactly. If you haven't got any, you have more to gain than if you have a lot. Yes. There were certainly catechisms, chanting. People would overhear them in the semicircle chanting.

If he discovered the mathematical genius inside of music, of course there's going to have to be chanting. And acoustics too. He probably knows about acoustics. He probably taught maths by question and answer. Two is two is four is three and three is six. You got it. Wait, six! There are other... Six, six, six.

Yeah, I'd have to get the right chord and be left. Yes, see? They weren't allowed to cut their finger and toenails during Sacred Times Festival in case. In case they drew. Just these weird corpse looking, no fingers and toenails. You can't have toenails that long. It hurts. I've been stabbed by my boyfriend's toenails before and and I was ready to throw them out of the window.

Is he a Pythagorean? No, he just doesn't look at his toenails until I go, ouch, it's a bit much. They weren't allowed to kill insects, which is a real problem in the southern, you know, south of Italy. In Moschito, surely. Exactly. They weren't allowed to kill anything, which is a bit like the Zwingliites. The Zwingliites were a Swiss radical Protestant sect. Yeah, in the 16th century. Yeah, that's right. They weren't allowed to kill anything, which is a bit like the Zwingliites. The Zwingliites were a Swiss radical Protestant sect. Yeah, in the 16th century. That's right. They weren't allowed to kill anything.

Unless they killed a hundred of them as a sacrifice for coming up with something really genius. And when it thundered, they all had to put their hands on the ground. Again, at 90, you know, come on. So were they trying to earth themselves from the lightning or what? Presumably. There's some jokes about that in Aristophanes, actually. You know, and an interest in insects, apparently, like they would have a flea jumping contest.

In a small-time travelling circus, maybe with the flea jumping. So, yeah, they had a lot of things, which is why an awful lot of scholars think that this is more of a religious sect than a college. I think it can be both. But also nobody knows how much of this was made up by comedians after he was gone and how much of this actually happened as well.

He also claimed to be able to talk to animals. So he could want to talk to bear down from attacking a city. But that could be interruption from Orphism. Orpheus could talk to the animals like Dr. Doolittle and so on. Okay. And so... Also, they were all his friends. So, of course, he could talk to them because it was like, that's my mate, Joe.

Yeah. And we're not told what language. So, if he's talking to his mate who is now a dog, does he go woof, woof, woof? Yes. Yes. Okay. I mean, I think we have to just summarize some of the stories told about him.

He could quell storms. So if a storm was coming, not only would they put their hands on the ground, he could calm a storm down. He would talk to bears, convince them not to attack a town. How many bears?

I mean, I guess bears are a thing in ancient Greece, right? They do live in that part of the world. He sounds like Dr. Dolittle and several X-Men altogether. Like he's got superpowers. I just like the graphic novel version of him, you know, like the storm. He's holding his hand like Moses, but he's also like, hey, little bear cub.

One day you'll be really cool in close-up phone photos that people take of you. People claim that he could be seen in two places at once. Yes. That's a very good one. But you know what? When you think about how many stunt doubles Putin has. I was going to say, if you're a good leader, then you go, I probably need to have others of me out there if you've got a startup.

So if all they had to do was find a tall guy and put long white sheets on him. I was going to say. Yeah, in trousers. Just a really hot Greek guy in white. What a wild ride. Really hot Greek guy in white. What a wild ride. Pythagoras, born in Samos, probably. Lived maybe 90 years, probably not.

Ran a school called the Semicircle, maybe. Maybe had superpowers, probably not. Maybe was a tyrant, maybe fled a tyrant. Probably did do music and maths and philosophy and was important. Believed in metempsychosis, the transmission of souls into other bodies, and then died in a hilarious bean injury. Possibly. That's at least my favourite story ever.

So, I mean, incredible life, although not all of it probably true, but we have here the legacy. The nuance window! This is the part of the show where Desiree and I sojourn to the semicircle to listen closely while Edith teaches us something that we need to know from the stage of the semicircle.

So my stopwatch is ready. Professor Edith, you have two minutes. Take it away, please. Many people in history, both ancient history and more recently, have claimed to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras himself. They've had all kinds of motives for that, sometimes running cults, sometimes wanting to sell medicines, all sorts of different motivations. In the 18th dog, who was a reincarnation of Pythagoras, do lots of tricks to show her intelligence. She was a border collie.

We've got a wonderful picture, which was actually off the advert that they stuck outside the pubs. She travelled all around the Midlands. She had sets of sort of pack of cards with numbers and letters on. She could, with her snout, spell Pythagoras. When asked who she was, she would put the cards down and say Pythagoras. She could do maths, right? I don't know if she could do the square on the hypotenuse or whatever, but she could do simple arithmetic. If asked two plus two, she would push four towards you. She could answer detailed questions on, and I love this, Ovid's Metamorphoses, the very text that brings us that long story about Pythagoras being vegetarian. So there's some cleverness underlying a very, very simple pub entertainment. But this was also quite subversive in its own way. This is the British working class laughing at the fact that classics and Greek philosophy is the elite education. So it's a beautiful combination. But I would very much like to have met the learned English dog, especially as she actually started her career because there was a thing called the learned French dog.

She actually started a career because there was a thing called the Learned French Dog. And all the Learned French Dog could do was speak French. She completely trumped him by being the reincarnation. Right. So let's all get to Northampton next Saturday night and ask them to reincarnate the Learned English Dog. Wow. I hope her soul has not departed that pub, even though her body has done. Oh, that's beautiful.

Thank you, Edith. Wow. It's such an interesting thing that he's so famous. Yeah. I can go into the streets of London right now and say, who was Pythagoras? Everybody knows. I will get way more, I know who that is, than if I said who was Sophocles. Pericles. Pericles, or some of the most important people we know.

Or like, who's the US president right now? Do you know, I mean like, you know, you ask people on the street any kind of question like, uh, uh. What is your name? Uh, uh, who's Pythagoras? A squared plus B squared equals C squared.

Like just, that is drilled into our brains. Isn't metemsochosis really frightening though? I mean, one of my great pleasures as I get older is a lot of the people who really I don't like very much are now dying. Right? It's like they're not there anymore. I mean, the idea that actually they are.

Or that you're going to see a cat and you're going to be like, it's you. All the comfort that comes out of the death of enemies. I don't know if that's making the edit, but that is very funny. So, what do you know now? It's time now for the So what do you know now?

This is our quickfire quiz for Desiree to see how much she has learned in this absolutely madcap episode where we have pinballed around. I've absorbed so much from this, but I'm not sure what if any of it is a fact. So let's do this test and we'll see what sticks as reality. You are our all-time quiz champion, Desiree.

Why do you always say that? I think people will forgive you if there is... Okay, good. This is the good one to have a misstep on. All right, let's see. We've definitely bounced around. Okay, here we go. Ten questions.

Let's see how you do. Question one. What Greek island was Pythagoras likely born on? Samos. It was Samos. The old school Mykonos. Party Island, great for wine. Now I really want to go there immediately.

Okay, cool. That was a good little tune there. Question two. What was one of the mythical stories told about Pythagoras' birth and parentage? Oh, just that he was the son of Apollo. He was named after the son and he was the son of Apollo. Or what was the other dad? Oh, I mean, or the son of a guy who like did, sold gems or something like that.

Question three. What was the name of the shape theme school that Pythagoras allegedly founded? I mean, the Semi Circle, which is like the worst reality show on Netflix. What? The Semi Circle. Okay. Question four. How did Pythagoras apparently help the athlete Eurimanes of Samos defeat his bigger, stronger opponents?

Okay. So he trained them and he told them to go to the gym. He was like, don't eat cheese. Definitely eat meat. Paleo. We said paleo. So he basically admitted the paleo diet, but it was the Pythagorean diet for gymnasts to work on their tiny little muscles. That's right.

No figs, no cheese, all meat. Oh, the figs. Yeah. But that's like no sweets, no carbs. Question five. What two opposite reasons did Pythagoras' biographers give for him leaving Samos and moving to Croton? Basically, he was fleeing a tyrant to become a tyrant. Question six.

In one of the stories about his death, why wouldn't Pythagoras run through a field of beans to escape his attackers? Because he didn't want to run through to trample the souls of his friends who had been reincarnated as beans. But also, either he was 90 and couldn't run or he died in a fire because that's what fire does or he just didn't eat inside of the muses temple. Amazing. Very good. I'm going to give you two points for that because that was a double answer. Okay. Question seven.

Which ancient civilization was already using Pythagoras' theorem centuries before he was born? The Babylonians, but also the Egyptians and everybody else too. Like everyone was using it. Definitely the Babylonians, probably the Egyptians. Yes. Question eight.

What is metempsychosis? The soul is separate from the body, and when the body dies, the soul gets reincarnated as another person. But maybe not, because at one point it was a puppy. Question nine. You're doing very well. Describe one of the sort of secretive rituals or beliefs of the Pythagorean secret society. Okay. Well, they chanted everything, like and forth to like learn and to respond.

You had to grow the toenails and fingernails. Like you could only cut them at certain times of year. That's it. Oh, and no sex. And also like all of your stuff should be communal stuff, but at my commune. Perfect answer. Okay. This for 11 out of 10.

Nice. Somehow you've achieved. Which ferocious animal did Pythagoras apparently convince to stop attacking a town? Bear. Exit not pursued by a bear. You stay right there, bear. And no storms either. He stopped it all. Very good.

Yes, it was Paddington Bear. Who was like, I was just going to come to the town to have like a meal and say some He just wanted some marmalade sandwiches. Pretty much. I came all the way from Peru. Desiree Birch, you've done it again. 11 out of 10. Thank you so much. What a riveting story. I'm not joking. Like, I feel like people should know this before they learn math because it's a lot more rock and roll than it's given credit for. Yeah, absolutely. Well, literally heavy metal.

Yes. The anvil. That's right. That's what I'm taking from this. Metal and Motown. You wouldn't have it without Pythagoras, who was from everywhere. Listener, if you want more of Desiree, why not check out

one of our many episodes with her, including the Columbian Exchange, the History of Timekeeping, the Paul Robeson one. That was really good. Love that one. And if you can't get

enough Greek history, try our episode on Athenian democracy. And remember, if you've enjoyed the podcast, please leave us a review, share the show with your friends, subscribe to You're Dead to Me on BBC Sounds so you never miss an episode. I'd just like to say a huge thank you to our guests in History Corner.

We had the fantastic Professor Edith Hall from the University of Durham. Thank you, Edith. Thank you so much. Hi, Retta. What does that mean? Sort of ancient Greek greeting, really. You guys. Oh, that was nice, does that mean? Sort of ancient Greek greeting, really. You guys. Oh, that was nice, wasn't it? That's pretty cool.

And in Comedy Corner, we have the delightful Desiree Birch. Thank you, Desiree. Oh, thank you, Greg. I love being on this show so much. It's an absolute favourite. It's an honour to be here. So thank you. And for all the listeners who tolerate me not knowing about stuff and finding out in front of you.

We love it. We love it. We love it. And to you, lovely listener, join me next time as we separate myth from truth for another historical subject. But for now, I'm off to go and warn people that eating baked beans is basically cannibalism. You're eating souls on toast. Stop it. Bye. This episode of You're Dead to Me was researched by Josh Rice. It was written by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, Emma Neguse and me. The audio producer was Steve Hankey.

Our production coordinator was Caitlin Hobbs. It was produced by Emmy Rose Price Goodfellow, me, and our senior producer, Emma Neguse. And our executive editor was Chris Ledgerd. I'm Tom Heap. And I'm Helen Cheresky. A journalist. And a physicist. Ready to tackle the biggest issues on the planet.

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