Liv Reads the Batrachomyomachia, the Battle of Frogs & Mice

Let's Talk About Myths, Baby! | Greek Mythology & the Ancient Mediterranean

Liv Albert

History, Comedy, Arts

4.8 • 5.5K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2022

⏱️ 35 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Liv dives into ancient parody and satire before reading the Batrachomyomachia, the Battle of Frogs and Mice, translated by Hugh Evelyn White.

CW/TW: far too many Greek myths involve assault. Given it's fiction, and typically involves gods and/or monsters, I'm not as deferential as I would be were I referencing the real thing.

Sources: select research by August Guszkowski; The Battle Between the Frogs and Mice, translated by A.E. Stallings; The Homeric Battle of the Frogs and Mice, edited by Joel Christensen and Erik Robinson; full reading translation by Hugh Evelyn-White.

Attributions and licensing information for music used in the podcast can be found here: mythsbaby.com/sources-attributions.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks to A-Cast for hosting and monetizing this podcast.
0:30.0	Now, ticket to on sale now at livenation.co.uk
0:40.0	Don't miss Youngblood Live.
1:10.0	Oh, hi, hello, and welcome to this second episode devoted to the ancient and oh so silly epic.
1:20.0	The Bat Trackco Myomacia.
1:23.0	I am that host of yours live and today, well today I'm not only here to just read you this ancient mini epic,
1:29.0	but also to share more about the background and the very idea of ancient satirical epics,
1:34.0	because man, they are fun and interesting and not mentioned nearly enough outside of academia.
1:39.0	It's a battle of frogs and mice.
1:41.0	We should all be talking about this masterpiece of puns and tiny vegetable body armor.
1:47.0	As I mentioned briefly on Tuesday's episode, the Bat Trackco Myomacia was written while who really knows when, or by who.
1:55.0	The mini epic has been dated from as early as the archaic period to as late as the first or second centuries, either BCE or CE.
2:02.0	It's often attributed to Homer, or at least named for him in the use of the term Homeric, but this is supremely unlikely,
2:09.0	not least because Homer was almost certainly not a person named Homer, but a tradition of oral storytelling that was eventually written down and attributed to that name.
2:18.0	I won't go into the nitty gritty details on why there is such variations in dating this epic,
2:23.0	but I've listed the wonderful sources that I've used in this episode's description if you want to know more.
2:29.0	What I'm more interested in is the tradition of satire and parody broadly, and for this I've been using some wonderful research done by August Kaskowski.
2:37.0	They had already done a load of research for another history podcast, and then that wasn't able to be used, so they came to me.
2:44.0	Big thank you for that. I do love when the research is already done for me, and it certainly helps especially when it comes to historical aspects,
2:51.0	because I love to hear what others find. My skills are really more in mythology.
2:56.0	And there were so many writers of parody in the ancient world, and we know lots of examples of parodical, is that the right word?
3:04.0	Works, including more mini-saterical epics like this one, though this is the only one that survives so intact.
	...

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