You're Dead to Me - Pythagoras (Radio Edit)

Episode Date: May 10, 2024

In this episode, Greg Jenner is joined by Professor Edith Hall and comedian Desiree Burch to learn about ancient Greek philosopher and mathematician Pythagoras. Pythagoras is famous in maths classes e...verywhere 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! This episode explores the myths and legends that grew up in the ancient world about Pythagoras’s life in the centuries after his death.This is a radio edit of the original podcast episode. For the full-length version, please look further back in the feed.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

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the BBC. This podcast is supported by advertising outside the UK. 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
Starting point is 00:00:41 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 on any number of brilliant Radio 4 programs including Natalie Haynes stands up for the classics and great lives is Professor Edith Hall. Welcome Edith. I'm absolutely thrilled to be here to triangulate with you two. Oh a 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've not born a dad. I just have to try to earn that level.
Starting point is 00:01:17 On every 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 Burch. Welcome back, Desiree. Oh, it's such a pleasure to be here. This is where I get all of my learning done. So
Starting point is 00:01:39 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? So what do you know? This is where I have a go at guessing, but 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. We all had to memorize his theorem about triangles in school. Say it with me now. A squared plus B squared, no.
Starting point is 00:02:09 A squared plus B squared equals C squared. 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 Spidagoras, I guess, I don't know. My boyfriend's Cypriot and he's like,
Starting point is 00:02:29 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 so. I don't know. I just enjoy playing the video game. That's, that's, that's the other thing I know about it. That's our first ever intervention in the Sawad 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.
Starting point is 00:02:57 Okay. Now you're right. I'm just going to do it with affect 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.
Starting point is 00:03:15 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. 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
Starting point is 00:03:35 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 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 called the Ionian philosophers, because that strip of Western Turkey, it's 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
Starting point is 00:04:17 very little about his childhood. He certainly travelled around, possibly to Egypt. He did go back to Samorza, 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 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.
Starting point is 00:04:51 I doubt if he lived that long. That gives him 90 years and the ancients had a great thing about longevity. If somebody was quite a heroic figure, they often claimed he'd lived pretty naturally long. I very much doubt if he was either born as early as 570 or lived all the way to 480. Okay. So living for 90 years at that point in history was not a thing that people were wanting to do? Well actually some did, weirdly. If you survived to like 25. Yes. 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. So we've already killed them off, 480 BCE, so the episode's already done, I guess we just go home now. That was quick.
Starting point is 00:05:30 No, actually, really, we're going to start again. This is a kind of cultural history of an idea of a man. 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 in antiquity, 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
Starting point is 00:06:05 about sex and parties and that kind of thing. Good stuff. Yeah. I'm so glad there's sex and parties, you guys. It's not just about math. You can keep listening. 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,
Starting point is 00:06:24 oh, my grandpa once told me this story about... MS. BENNETT 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. We haven't got any about by Thagat, 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
Starting point is 00:07:02 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 of very weird stories. 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 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.
Starting point is 00:07:38 The sun god. Wait, what? He was the sun god. Apollo, 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 Mnisarchos, which is just a fairly common, ancient Greek name. He might have been a gem engraver or somebody who both engraved and sold gems. Semi-tachy lower bourgeoisie. A story arose that his mum and dad, when they wanted a baby, had gone off to the Pythian Oracle, asked
Starting point is 00:08:12 about having a baby. So then a myth starts up because there's so many myths about people both having a... Heracles has both Zeus as a dad and he's got a bloke as a dad, Fitcher. So he could have two dads. Who was a bartender. He could have two dads. So we have this story that Pythagoras, when he's born, thereke as a damn fiction. So he could have two dads. Who was a bartender. He could have two dads. 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,
Starting point is 00:08:36 he's going to be perfect, right? Well, in fact, one of the more respectable sources is a chap called Eceiarchus, 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, most philosophers, you know. I have to say that most of my colleagues in philosophy are not what I would call a hottie. They're thotties. Decaiarchus said he was very tall of noble st stature, his voice, his character and every other aspect were marked by an exceptional degree of charm and embellishment. He always wore white. He
Starting point is 00:09:10 had a golden thigh. They say he had a golden thigh, which is a little bit suspec- 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.
Starting point is 00:09:28 That's what Golden Thigh is. And his weakness. Yes. 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 travelling 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
Starting point is 00:09:51 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. There's 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
Starting point is 00:10:26 Phoenician. Now that means he's from the Levant, which means he may have been very Lebanese. There's lots of lots of interchangings 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. It depends on the time of year, as all my Greek friends say. But I think he's a brilliant example of the way that the ancient Greeks with a conduit thought 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. They tended to meet more people, so they got to be the ones who said these are our ideas.
Starting point is 00:11:07 Because we've collected them and we put them down to give them to you, so they're ours. You've got it. That can't be the beginning of that idea. Okay, understood. 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. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:11:30 Not just a triangle nerd, not just a mystic philosopher, not just a sort of esoteric golden-fied wonder beast with Pythagorabs, because we've said he's hot. Pythagoras, shredded. He's also a sports instructor. So they say. He also taught PE. Do you want to guess who he's maybe training?
Starting point is 00:11:48 Wait, 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.
Starting point is 00:12:06 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. Which sports? Like which events? Well all the all the standard track and field. But that again it's not as weird as it looks because Socrates is always going off to the polystery, to the gymnasium to talk to handsome young philosophers who've just finished
Starting point is 00:12:38 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. 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, Sybaris is actually another city in southern Italy, where they did nothing but feast and have sex all day and every day. Sounds awful.
Starting point is 00:13:14 Yeah, 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, 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. And the thing that ultimately we do not know, but the idea
Starting point is 00:13:39 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. They could really easily be true. It was the age of tyrants. The cities outside mainland Greece were almost all tyrannies. In fact, all of the ones in mainland Greece, this is the age of tyrants. This is exactly what it is. They had replaced hereditary kings and so you got a new thing where the smartest 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
Starting point is 00:14:14 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, escaping a tyrant to become a tyrant, but he was fleeing. He wasn't just like, 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, boom, for shame. It's
Starting point is 00:14:42 like no public hanging. So we've got poor theory, 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.
Starting point is 00:14:58 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 or Cailan 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
Starting point is 00:15:34 to be a bit difficult if you're 90. Yes, you're right. We have to revise down the age probably. The age, because you can't get chased anywhere. There's another story that he didn't actually run into the Temple 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. You can't have any ancient Greek story without at least one revenge motive. I mean, you know, it had to go in.
Starting point is 00:16:10 It had to go in. Someone's got to feel vengeful if it's a Greek story. Pythagoras is killed by Cylon 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. Do you want to guess how the beans end up killing him or being responsible
Starting point is 00:16:35 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? Because... 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? Metempsychosis, okay.
Starting point is 00:16:57 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.
Starting point is 00:17:17 The story goes that he's being chased by Cylon'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 okay so he doesn't want to eat them because the beans are people. Yeah 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 could he've been like I'll just make a sharp left and run that way. Edith, can we talk about Pythagoras the philosopher in terms of proper philosophy?
Starting point is 00:17:50 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. Yeah, absolutely, just because it's hilarious. Yeah, so what do we know of his philosophical position, other than metempsychosis, I guess,
Starting point is 00:18:10 which is his big thing? Yes, well, 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 an animal. What makes humans different is that we've got this soul, the body is a prison. This is why the Neoplatonists, the Neoplatonists, 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. The other big thing is that he was deeply
Starting point is 00:18:42 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 these business about perfect fourths and perfect fifths and octaves and realized that there's something musical about mathematical harmony. 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. Desiree, do you remember what Pythagoras' theorem is for triangles?
Starting point is 00:19:20 It's a squared plus b squared equals c squared as a right triangle. The sum of the squares the two sides is equal to the square of the hypotenuse. Yeah, very good. Yeah, a GCC maths textbook 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.
Starting point is 00:19:52 They were the ones who were there before the Persians. 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-maker. 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. So, yeah, so we've definitely got evidence of Pythagorean ideas in pre-Pythagoras by
Starting point is 00:20:21 several centuries, back with the 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? I'd go further. I would say that he actually could, we could call him the father of geometry in that not because he was the first to do it, but because he's the first to make it a separate study of area of science. Is he before Euclid? It's like a discipline. Is he pre-Euclid? Yeah, way, way, way, way, way, hundreds of years. So I think he turns it into a distinct area of study and promulgates different theories including this, doesn't really matter where he got it from if he's sort of founding the discipline. Okay, so I
Starting point is 00:21:02 think we're back on board with Pythagoras. There was a spell where we were thinking this guy sounds like an absolute fraud. So 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. 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 people gather
Starting point is 00:21:28 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 being a nation. And they've seen it all come and go, and that's kind of amazing. Beautiful.
Starting point is 00:21:42 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 gonna do stuff stuff. I thought you were going to say a bus shelter. That's where most of the peeing happens in my community. Fair enough, fair enough. 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?
Starting point is 00:22:07 Do you have to give them all your money and renounce all of your family and friends and drink any flavour? And sleep with Pythagoras whenever you want. Obviously, yes. Well, it's interesting that he did say goods should be held in common. Now it's more attractive to say goods should be held in common. Goods should be held in my house. In my commerce.
Starting point is 00:22:27 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 it's going to have to be chanting. Of course it did. And acoustics too, probably.
Starting point is 00:22:45 He probably knows about acoustics. He probably taught maths by question and answer. Two is two is four, three and three is six. Wait, six. Six, six, six. Yeah, to have to get the right chord. They weren't allowed to cut their fingernails during sacred times festival in case. Gross.
Starting point is 00:23:11 In case they do. Just these weird corpse looking, no fingers and toenails. I mean look, you can't have toenails that long. It hurts. I've been stabbed by my boyfriend's toenails before and I was ready to throw him out of them. Is he a pythocker? No, he just doesn't, because he just stabbed by my boyfriend's toenails before and I was ready to throw him out of the womb. Is he a pythagorean? No, he just doesn't, because he just doesn't look at his toenails until I go, ouch, it's
Starting point is 00:23:31 a bit much. They weren't allowed to kill insects, which is a real problem in the southern, you know, south of Italy. Yeah, they were mostly musky. Exactly. They weren't allowed to kill anything. And when it thundered, they all had to put their hands on the ground. Again, we're at 90, you know. So were they trying to earth themselves from the lightning or what? Presumably. There's some jokes about that in Aristophanes actually. And an interest
Starting point is 00:23:54 in insects apparently, like they would have a fleet jumping contest. 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. What a wild ride. High fagrus, born in Samos, probably, lived maybe 90 years, probably not, ran a school called the semi-circle, 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 favorite story.
Starting point is 00:24:39 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. Well, 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. Edith Pettigrew-Morris Many people in history, both ancient history and more recently, have claimed to be a reincarnation of Pythagoras himself. They've had all kinds
Starting point is 00:25:15 of motives for that, sometimes running cults, sometimes wanting to sell medicines, all sorts of different motivations. In the 18th century, my very favourite claimed reincarnation took place. So if you go to a pub in Northampton in about 1780, you could see the learned English 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. I mean, she travelled all around the Midlands. She had sets of sort of a 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 and
Starting point is 00:26:03 the hypotenuse or whatever, but she could do simple arithmetic. If asked two plus two, she would push four towards you. 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. And all the learned French dog could do was speak French. She completely trumped him by being the reincarnation.
Starting point is 00:26:45 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. 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, Reda. What does that mean?
Starting point is 00:27:07 It's an ancient Greek greeting, really. You guys. Oh, that was nice, wasn't it? That's pretty cool. Yeah. And in Comedy Corner, we have the delightful Desiree Burch. Thank you, Desiree. Oh, thank you, Greg. I love being on this show so much. It's my absolute favorite. It's an honor to be here. 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
Starting point is 00:27:29 is basically cannibalism. You're eating souls on toast. Stop it. Bye. Why do some of the brands we love most hit dizzy heights, but then ultimately end up toast? I'm Sean Farrington, presenter of the BBC Radio 4 series Toast, which unpicks what went wrong with big business ideas and examines why they were so popular in the first place. We hear from people directly involved in building a brand's fortunes. Everybody still wanted it to work so I saw an opportunity to try and make that happen. We were really really excited about what investment was to come. And get expert insights into why they faltered.
Starting point is 00:28:10 You know, a lot of people say, did Twitter mess it up? My response to that is no. From the roadside restaurant chain Little Chef to the video sharing site Vine via Greenshield's Stamps loyalty scheme and Safeway supermarkets. Toast. Listen on BBC Sounds.

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