Hello, this is Let's Talk About Mids Baby

and I am, of course, your host live, because who on earth else would be here talking into your ears right now?

I am here today with, yes, a conversation episode

This week I spoke with Joel Christensen from Brandice, who is also a face behind the sententei antiqui blog

and I am going to just assume that I pronounce that correctly, but I am not great at Latin

and it is a resource for accessible translations of ancient Greek and Latin among so many other things

Great Twitter presence, always something exciting going on there

And we talked all about Homer, the idea of Homer, what Homer was and was not, what the evidence is for that

I talked all about Homeric epic form and composition and oh my god, so fascinating, such a really interesting insight into the history behind the idea of Homer and Homeric epic in the ancient Greek world

I learned so much when it comes to that whole idea which I mean, I just sort of exist in the world with the epics

and I rarely have thought about how they came to be beyond, you know, Homeric Bards

but this has been so interesting, it was just absolutely fascinating

A couple notes, we did have some technical difficulties so there are a little bit of echoey runovers but I tried to cut them down as much as humanly possible

I am not particularly skilled when it comes to editing, you'd think I would have learned more but it's really hard

that and due to scheduling and my own inability to understand how babies function, we did have Joel's baby in the room, Leila

she is lovely and adorable and she did make some sounds now and again

I cut out what I could and there are moments where I do leave in talk about where she is and what's going on just so that it kind of makes more sense rather than a conversation being super clipped up with baby sounds

so just a warning about that, honestly the conversation is so interesting and incredible that a couple little, couple little baby, you know, not straight crying, baby sounds, that's what we're calling them

I think it's all worth it for this fascinating conversation about Homer and not just about Homer but also toxicity of hero myth and ideation

which is really interesting and sort of going into how the way we see some of these men particularly like Odysseus and Achilles

as heroes then creates this larger problem with what the idea of heroism really is super fascinating stuff all around

there's talk of toxic masculinity and patriarchal nonsense and men's rights activism as it relates to some heroism shit

...