Pandora, Greece, and Paradise at the Edge of the World with James Richardson
We all know the story: the first woman ever made lifted the lid on something she'd been told to leave alone, releasing sickness and sorrow and death into the world, and we've been paying for it ever since. It's the tidiest morality tale in the whole Greek canon, but almost every part of it is wrong.
In today's episode I sit down with James Richardson (no relation!) to talk about the real story behind Pandora and her jar — that's right, it wasn't even a box — and why he found this myth so inspiring that it shaped his latest golden age archaeological thriller, The Olympus Vendetta.
James has spent years retelling Greek mythology to his own sons, and he traces these stories back through Hesiod, the Bronze Age collapse and three thousand years of retellings. We cover what Pandora's myth actually says, where the Land of the Hesperides might really be, and why Heracles keeps solving his labours with his brain instead of his fists.
Grab a copy of the Olympus Vendetta HERE
Here's what it's all about:
AN ANCIENT GREEK LEGEND. AN UNHOLY ALLIANCE. AN APOCALYPTIC WEAPON.
December 1939. New York P.I. Jackson Raine thinks he's hunting kidnappers. He's wrong. A missing persons case drags him onto the trail of a secret stretching back to the dawn of civilization, and into the path of the Spanish Inquisition, returned from the shadows and allied with the Third Reich's elite occult division. Both are racing to find the Well of Sorrows — the real Pandora's Box — and the weapon sealed inside it.
From a floating fortress to the caves of Greece to a long-lost island, Jack has to unlock the past before the gods take their vengeance.
Perfect for fans of Indiana Jones, James Rollins and Andy McDermott.
Grab a copy of the Olympus Vendetta HERE
In This Episode, We Explore:
- The real Pandora myth — no box, no accident. Hesiod's original Greek describes a pithos, a massive storage jar, and Pandora herself was less a careless woman than a "beautiful evil" engineered by Zeus specifically to punish mankind.
- The Land of the Hesperides — the Greeks' mythical western paradise, guarded by a never-sleeping hundred-headed dragon and shifting location on the map as Greek sailors pushed further west — from the Atlas Mountains to the Canaries.
- Heracles, the thinking man's hero — how the "world's strongest man" solves most of his twelve labors through cunning rather than brute force, and the surprising family tie that links him directly to Pandora's bloodline.
- The Temple of Artemis as sanctuary — one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, four times the size of the Parthenon, and a literal place of legal asylum where women fled persecution under a matriarchal religious order.
Episode Timestamps:
- 03:41 - Zeus and Prometheus
- 06:22 - Hesperides Paradise
- 09:25 - Apples Atlantis Avalon
- 13:40 - Heracles and Myth Variants
- 17:44 - Pandora Lineage Link
- 22:18 - Temple of Artemis
- 27:33 - Pandora as Propaganda
- 32:42 - Childhood Myth Origins
- 36:58 - Olympus Vendetta Overview
Links Referenced in This Episode:
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www.lukerichardsonauthor.com/templartour For the first time ever, we're inviting you to join us on one of our adventures. And what better place to start than one of my favourite destinations… Portugal. But we’re not just going for the beaches and the wine, we’re following in the footsteps of one of history's most enigmatic organisations... the Knights Templar. We're going on the trail of the Templars in Portugal! Over five days and four nights, we'll guide you from the winding streets of Lisbon to the hilltop castle of Almourol, the sacred halls of Tomar's Convent of Christ, and the enchanting esoteric grottoes of Quinta da Regaleira—the very place that inspired my book The Templar Enigma. www.lukerichardsonauthor.com/templartour
Transcript
We all know the story.
Speaker A:It's one of the oldest of all time.
Speaker A:The first woman ever created.
Speaker A:Opening a jar and releasing evil spirits into the world.
Speaker A:That's Pandora.
Speaker A:And her famous box or jar, depending on which translation you read, forms the basis of so much of what we think about ancient Greek mythology.
Speaker A:But what if the story is something far more ancient or something far more mysterious than we've been led to believe?
Speaker A:Perhaps today we'll find out.
Speaker A:Hey, I'm Luke.
Speaker A:I'm an author of archaeological adventure novels.
Speaker A:I traveled the world looking for stories to put into my books and share with you right here on the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker A:Now, now, now, just quickly before we dive in, if you would like some more adventure in your life, I would love to welcome you inside the Adventure Society.
Speaker A:This weekly newsletter is your ticket to travel with me to share my real world adventures and to find out first when a new story or a new season of this podcast drops.
Speaker A:There's a link in the show Notes to join right now.
Speaker A:James Richardson joins me today.
Speaker A: enture series set in the late: Speaker A:His latest book, the Olympus Vendetta, sees Jackson Rain going head to head with Nazis, inquisitors, and forces far older and stranger than either, all in a race to uncover a lost Greek legend that may have been hiding in plain sight for thousands of years.
Speaker A:It's great fun and today we're going to go behind the scenes and talk about the legend, unpack the legends just a little bit.
Speaker A:James, welcome back to the Adventure Story podcast.
Speaker B:Thank you very much for inviting me back.
Speaker B:It's great to be here.
Speaker A:It is, yeah.
Speaker A:I always enjoy talking about your books and this one, I mean, this is the sort of conversation that I, that I imagine this podcast being part of because we're sort of peeling back the.
Speaker A:Peeling back the story a little bit and going into the history behind it or what we understand of that.
Speaker A:So we all know the legend of Pandora, or we all sort of think, think we know it, don't we?
Speaker A:But the real myth is more interesting than that.
Speaker A:What does, what's it about?
Speaker B:We generally use the expression, like Pandora's box, quite colloquially, like all the time.
Speaker B:Now you sort of say, oh, we're, you're going to open up Pandora's box by doing that.
Speaker B:And it's a warning that if you do something, bad things are going to happen.
Speaker B:But, but before going Any further just to, to, to sort of highlight for the, you know, you realists out there that Pandora never actually opened a box.
Speaker B:The earliest known texts of Alta were written by Hesiod about 700 BC, and the word he used is PFOS, which is actually a massive earthenware storage jar used for wine and oil and grain, that sort of stuff.
Speaker B:But a translation era in the 16th century saw it turn from a jar into a small box.
Speaker B:And that's the image that stuck in popular culture ever since.
Speaker B:But the, the actual myth isn't just about this obscure figure, Pandora, who ancient storytellers like Hesiod plucked out of their heads to explain why evil exists.
Speaker B:And she's often portrayed as this rather sort of dappy figure by our standards, who just sort of simply didn't do what she was told, opened the lid on a magical jar and out popped strife and disease and sorrow and death.
Speaker B:But I kind of think Pandora's the original concept of a genetically engineered biological weapon in some ways that she was created specifically to punish mankind and not humanity at the time, but, but mankind, because Greek mythology consists of five ages.
Speaker B:You got the Golden Age, Silver, Bronze, Heroic Age, and then the Iron Age, which is when the Pandora myth was first sort of written or first appears anyway.
Speaker B:And it's arguably the age that we still live in where us as mere humans, we have to work hard, we have to toil, we have to deal with misery and strife and death and all these things which make life sound pretty depressing.
Speaker B:But that was obviously their, their way of looking at it.
Speaker B:But as you might have guessed, things weren't like this in the, in the Golden Age, which was just after the, the Titan.
Speaker B:Prometheus created man and these men, and they were just men, no women at that time.
Speaker B:They wanted nothing.
Speaker B:They didn't have to work, they didn't have to, to do anything except basically exist just to worship the gods, the gods of Olympus.
Speaker B:And to ensure they, they didn't advance beyond this role, Zeus hid fire so that they, they couldn't cook, they couldn't see at night, they couldn't keep warm, and all these things that eventually lead to the concept of what we think of as civilization.
Speaker B:But feeling pity for them, Prometheus stole the fire and gifted it to man.
Speaker B:And that's where Pandora comes in.
Speaker B:And that Zeus created Pandora or ordered her to be created as the first woman to be a, quote, a beautiful evil.
Speaker B:And lots of the other gods gifted her attributes like her beauty from Aphrodite and her cunning and her curiosity and then she was sent to marry Prometheus brother.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And as a wedding gift, she was given the jar and she was told obviously not to open it, even though she'd basically been genetically engineered to ensure that she did open it and bring about the misery onto mankind as punishment.
Speaker B:So even though there's this perception of her as a source of evil and temptation, certainly within a hierarchical, patriarchal ancient Greek society, Pandora is to me as much a vessel of the God's vengeance as the jar itself.
Speaker A:So almost like a warning, a tragic figure in some kind of Shakespearean sort of play, it sounds like.
Speaker B:Right, yeah, yeah, very Shakespearean about it.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:No, that's fascinating.
Speaker A:And I like that, as you say that she wasn't just.
Speaker A:She.
Speaker A:She wasn't doing it in a sort of silly sense.
Speaker A:It wasn't a m. It wasn't a mistake, you know, she was.
Speaker A:She was sort of destined to do this thing and created.
Speaker A:To do this.
Speaker A:To do this thing.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right, yeah.
Speaker B:Very much contrived from inception.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:To bring about the.
Speaker B:The downfall.
Speaker B:Not so much the downfall, but.
Speaker B:Yeah, to bring about the punishment of mankind.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker A:Fascinating, fascinating.
Speaker A:And the land of Hesperides.
Speaker A:Is I.
Speaker A:Am I saying that right or.
Speaker B:Yeah, the Hesperides.
Speaker B:Yes, that's right, yep.
Speaker A:That's central to the research and central to the book as well.
Speaker A:And for people who haven't come across it, like myself, what is the land of Hesperides?
Speaker A:And.
Speaker A:And why did the ancient Greeks believe it was a real place or did they believe it was a real place at all?
Speaker A:Is it a fictional sort of thing, a cautionary story or something like that?
Speaker A:I'm thinking of the comparison between sort of the Garden of Eden here.
Speaker B:Yeah, well, the land of the Hesperides.
Speaker B:It was the ancient Greek concept of a mythical paradise.
Speaker B:And to them it existed at the extreme western edge of the known world.
Speaker B:Right.
Speaker B:Where the sun sets into the cosmic ocean.
Speaker B:And that's quite similar to things like ancient Egyptian mythology and cosmology.
Speaker B:Where the sun sets in the west on the western bank of the Nile.
Speaker B:That's where the dead goes and all this sort of stuff.
Speaker B:So there's lots of links there to the concept of the West.
Speaker B:And lots of other ancient cultures viewed the west in the same way as the Twilight Zone between the mortal realm and the divine.
Speaker B:And it was a magical place.
Speaker B:And most importantly, it was a place that mortals couldn't easily reach.
Speaker B:In some cultures you had to be dead to go there.
Speaker B:Some places you have to be divine to go there.
Speaker B:So it was, it was really sort of special place to them.
Speaker B:But the name the Hesperides is actually what they call not so much the landmass themselves, but it was the group of, of of nymphs, these beautiful nymphs who lived there.
Speaker B:And they were the daughters of the Titan Atlas, that who's the guy who, who holds the sky on his shoulder in mythology.
Speaker B:And they were tasked with with tending a sacred walled garden containing a magical apple tree.
Speaker B:And this tree belonged to Hera who was Zeus's wife and the queen of the gods.
Speaker B:And it had pure golden apples that were said to grant immortality and more importantly that the tree was guarded night and day by a never sleeping hundred headed dragon called Ladon.
Speaker B:And because he had a hundred heads, there was always some of them awake and keeping guards that no one could get past this, this guy.
Speaker B:But did the Greeks sort of generally think it was a physical place?
Speaker B:Well, yes, yeah they did.
Speaker B:They actually thought it had a physical geographic location.
Speaker B:It wasn't just this sort of fluffy ideas of out there in the wild.
Speaker B:But it's rumored location kept shifting as ancient Greeks started sailing further and further from, from the islands and from the mainland Greece further into the western Mediterranean.
Speaker B:So first they placed it in the, the foothills of the Atlas Mountains, hence the link to Atlas, and that's in modern day Morocco.
Speaker B:And then it kind of got moved to just beyond the, the Straits of Gibraltar which the ancients called the Pillars of Heracles.
Speaker B:And eventually sort of it moved further out into the Atlantic Ocean itself.
Speaker B:And there's this really sort of fascinating theory that the legendary golden apples are actually a distorted traveler's tale of regular oranges from far flung sort of lands like Tenerife.
Speaker B:And the canaries that sort of came back got warped in retellings about how amazing they were into the idea of the golden apples.
Speaker A:That's fascinating, isn't it?
Speaker A:And I love that because the Pillars of Heracles is links to Plato's Atlantis.
Speaker A:So legend doesn't it, and the idea that they're beyond the pillars and, and that's where you'll find it.
Speaker A:But I suppose what we're dealing with here is, is the way these sorts of cultures connect to one another.
Speaker A:And they, and they, there are links throughout history with all sorts of different things.
Speaker A:Almost like they've got a sort of joint mythology that has become sort of individualized over time.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right, yeah.
Speaker B:I mean sort of this whole idea of the Western Isles existing out there sort of beyond the Pillars of Heracles.
Speaker B:That's, that's echoed through Roman mythology where they had the.
Speaker B:The Blessed Isles and they sent expeditions out to try and find them, or the Fortunate Isles that they were also called then obviously the Romans have lots of deep connections to Greek mythology.
Speaker B:So whether that was continuation of the Greek idea of the land of the Hesperides or something completely different, I don't know.
Speaker B:But it seems very striking that they have these two very similar myths going on there.
Speaker B:And even in later sort of Celtic and Arthurian law, you get the.
Speaker B:The island of Avalon.
Speaker B:And that again, is explicitly.
Speaker B:Even though lots of people associated now places like Glastonbury, the original tellings actually say it was a Western paradise of healing and immortality.
Speaker B:And its name actually translates.
Speaker B:I think the original Welsh name translates to the island of the Apples.
Speaker B:So you kind of wonder again.
Speaker B:Yeah, this idea of apples on the Western paradise.
Speaker B:And yeah, sort of most striking really is like that.
Speaker B:That resemblance between, to me anyway, between the land of the Hesperides and the.
Speaker B:The biblical Garden of Eden.
Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:I was talking to David Rolle on the podcast a couple of weeks ago, and he was talking about how he has.
Speaker A:He believes, and this is what he said, and I think he's got some good things that he traced the Garden of Eden to a specific place, a valley in northern Iran, I think it was.
Speaker A:And he was talking all about how it links in all these different ways, various rivers and.
Speaker A:And particular soil content and all of these things that link to that place.
Speaker A:And yeah, so the fact that these have got some kind of backing in the way that you talk there about apples and oranges, and there are these clues on there, these sort of breadcrumbs that we can pick up today to decide to theorize as to whether these were fictional places or whether they were actually real points on the.
Speaker A:On the world that we can visit today, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:I actually read a few of David's books years ago.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:Legend, I think, was the one talking about Genesis and another one Time of the Kings or something.
Speaker B:I think it was cool.
Speaker B:But yeah, I mean, they're fantastic because they really go into that comparative.
Speaker B:I don't know if you class it as comparative mythology or archeology, but yeah, and he sort of delves into the real world locations and explanations for things found in the Bible, I think, isn't it.
Speaker B:It is very, very biblical.
Speaker B:I believe this is where he studies and.
Speaker B:And that's exactly where I was kind of going with the Olympus Vendetta, you know, once I sort of Came across this idea of the land of the Hesperides and automatically I just thought of the Garden of Eden and how similar they were because they both feature a pristine sacred garden.
Speaker B:Both sort of these extreme borders of the known world.
Speaker B:Both of them have got your tree with your forbidden life giving or immortality giving fruit at the center of the story.
Speaker B:They've both got like a serpentine antagonist says guarding it like, like Ladon in, in the Greek stories or, or Satan in Genesis and that they're both protected by these divine figures.
Speaker B:Like in Greece it's the, the Hesperides nymphs in, in the Bible it's the, the, the what they call the, the cherubs, the cherubim.
Speaker B:And they're there to, to protect the, this garden from, from anyone else.
Speaker B:And then obviously, you know, of Eden, you know, features the, the Eve character who's very similar in, in some ways to the Pandora character, even though Pandora doesn't actually feature in the Land of Hesperides stories.
Speaker B:You know, I still, still sort of saw this.
Speaker B:There's sort of a syncretism.
Speaker B:There's a link between the two.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:And I suppose we have to mention Heracles, which is the Greek version, but we would know this in the Roman term Hercules.
Speaker A:Right, that, that's the sort of delineation, the connection between those two characters.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So yeah, Hercules is the very much the Roman sort of version of the name that's become more popularized.
Speaker B:But yeah, it was Heracles to the ancient Greeks.
Speaker B:And obviously what I love about Heracles is that everyone even today knows something about Hercules.
Speaker B:You know, even if it's just that he was super strong and had big muscles or that he completed these 12 seemingly impossible labors.
Speaker B:Even if you don't know what the Labors are, you still know again, a bit like that Pandora's box type thing.
Speaker B:It's just become part of your colloquial sort of language, isn't it?
Speaker B:But I mean, yeah, I love the, the heritage stories.
Speaker B:And you know, I grew up just reading all the myths and legends of not just Heracles, but all the, all the Greek gods and the, the heroes.
Speaker B:And that's what's nice about the, the Greek mythology is you've got your gods and you've got your heroes and they're quite two separate sort of entities going on there and they have these clashes between them and the gods are just, they're just not nice people.
Speaker B:It's not like, you know, some of the Egyptian stories very much Focused just on the gods and the Norse.
Speaker B:Again, they're very much focused on the gods.
Speaker B:But in ancient Greek mythology, you have the gods and the humans and the heroes, and they're all interacting and they're all muddled together.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:Yeah, that's why I think so.
Speaker B:It's so fascinating about it.
Speaker B:And it's kind of come full circle for me because I grew up reading all these stories of these incredible exploits about Heracles, and now I read them with my sons.
Speaker B:Well, we sit down, you know, very often.
Speaker B:We've read through quite a few books.
Speaker B:Heracles is definitely their favorite.
Speaker B:What stimulated me wanting to.
Speaker B:To bring him into.
Speaker B:Into one of my Jackson Rain stories of what he just makes is this great ancient figure that everyone knows something about, but maybe not a huge amount, but, yeah, I sort of.
Speaker B:Sort of struggled to know where to start with that.
Speaker B:But, yeah, I love, love Heracles.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's fascinating.
Speaker A:Fascinating.
Speaker A:And do the sources all agree on these characters or are they sort of.
Speaker A:Are there different interpretations of the same.
Speaker A:Of the same things?
Speaker B:Yeah, there's loads of different interpretations.
Speaker B:There's loads of different versions of the same stories.
Speaker B:Like, you know, some.
Speaker B:You know, with Heracles, for instance, some of the Labors are in different orders.
Speaker B:So what I particularly like about Heracles is he pops up all over the place.
Speaker B:And I sort of quite often think of the sort of Greek mythology a bit like a Bronze Age.
Speaker B:I call it like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, you know, because you've got all these different characters, all these different heroes, and they've all got their own unique stories, but they're always popping up in each other's stories here, there and everywhere.
Speaker B:And Heracles, for instance, has a really big role to play in Jason and the Argonauts.
Speaker B:And that's led to lots of discussion about where in Heracles life, the various tasks take place.
Speaker B:And there's quite an accepted order, but there's quite a few different interpretations because, you know, Labor 6 couldn't have happened if he'd been with the Argonauts at that time, because the Argonauts at that time were, you know, fighting against, you know, Diaz father in the far side of the world or against the Amazons.
Speaker B:And, yeah, I mean, they sort of delve into different aspects of the personalities.
Speaker B:Sometimes they're portrayed as quite unpleasant characters sometimes, whereas other times they, you know, you're dashing heroes.
Speaker B:And again, it's very, very patriarchal.
Speaker B:You know, there's not that many strong female characters, but that said, there are quite a few, mainly the gods like Hera and Artemis and some of the characters like that.
Speaker A:Yeah, it's a.
Speaker A:It's an interesting world to think about.
Speaker A:And much like the Pandora's box, I feel like once you sort of know a little bit, you, you want to go further in you, you, you.
Speaker A:There's always more to know and different interpretations to sort of bring, to bring back about those things.
Speaker B:And it's all.
Speaker B:There's all these links as well, that.
Speaker B:And sometimes they're not really obvious.
Speaker B:So, yeah, going back to good old Heracles again.
Speaker B:When I started coming up with this idea, I'd had this idea about the land of the Hesperides and Eden, this idea of.
Speaker B:And an interpretation of her with Eve.
Speaker B:But I also wanted to bring in Heracles.
Speaker B:And, you know, as a writer, you know, sometimes you could look at something and think, I'm just shoehorning a character even for the sake of it there.
Speaker B:And all of a sudden I stumbled upon this fact that Heracles actually has a biological link to Bandora in that he married Pandora's.
Speaker B:I think it was her granddaughter Diana, who was Heracles final wife, who ended up actually accidentally killing him.
Speaker B:So she's got quite an important role to play.
Speaker B:Gave him a. Wow.
Speaker B:The tunic soaked in venom, which basically set his skin on fire.
Speaker B:And that's how Heracles meets his.
Speaker B:His doom, sadly, at the end, because she, She's.
Speaker B:She thinks he's running off with another woman.
Speaker B:And this tunic will.
Speaker B:Will make him stay in love with her.
Speaker B:So it's another one of those.
Speaker B:Those tales.
Speaker B:So, yeah, quite often end in a sad way, some of these Greek tales, don't they?
Speaker B:Yeah, Greek tragedies, literally.
Speaker B:But yeah.
Speaker B:So he married Pandora's granddaughter and they had a child which he called Pan.
Speaker B:Pan Dayi, I believe her name was.
Speaker B:So he actually fathered one of Pandora's direct descendants.
Speaker B:Once I found that, I thought that's.
Speaker B:Yeah, you know, that just works perfectly with sort of linking it all together, justifying why Heracles is involved with a Pandora story.
Speaker B:And of course, Heracles is also the character who, in the Greek myths, his, I think, is his 11th labor, as most people accept it.
Speaker B:He's the one who actually travels to the land of the Hesperides.
Speaker B:And he's the only one who's successful in stealing one of these golden apples from.
Speaker B:From Hera's tree.
Speaker B:And he does that through sort of tricking Atlas.
Speaker B:He.
Speaker B:Heracles takes the sky from.
Speaker B:From Atlas and He holds the sky on his shoulders and you know, being Heracles, he's the only guy in the world strong enough to do this.
Speaker B:And while he does that, Atlas wanders into the land of the Hesperides, takes an apple, brings it back, he tries to do over Heracles by leaving him to hold the sky forever.
Speaker B:And Heracles just manages to manipulate the situation again, says, oh, hey, hang on, just hold it just one second while I just readjust these pads on my shoulders because, you know, eternity is kind of a long time to be old in the sky.
Speaker B:He does it.
Speaker B:Heracles gets the apple and says, and he heads off and lives happily ever after.
Speaker B:Till he burns to death with a, you know, poisoned robe anyway, and leaving Atlas behind.
Speaker B:So again, there's that link there between Heracles and the land of Hesperides.
Speaker A:I like that.
Speaker A:I like that.
Speaker A:And I wonder how many modern storytellers have been inspired by.
Speaker A:I mean, it's not a question you can answer, I suppose, have been inspired by these stories because they are, they are tales that are very modern in the way that they.
Speaker A:Or you're using intelligence rather than brawn, you know, you're, you're using.
Speaker A:There are sort of modern lessons, aren't there, in these, in these thousand, thousand year old tales, you know?
Speaker B:Yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:And with Heracles, like, what I find really fascinating is that the image of him is always this muscle bound, gruntish sort of hero, you know, is so strong, the world's strongest man, you know, greatest warrior and all this sort of stuff.
Speaker B:But actually I'm retelling some of the stories from my newsletter on a weekly basis, but with a bit of a gangster slant to tie into themes.
Speaker B:And actually, as I'm going through it, I become more and more fascinated by how very rarely does Heracles find a solution that's just about using his gruntish nature.
Speaker B:He's got a head on his shoulders, he's always thinking through and using cunning and deception to sort of solve these seemingly impossible labors.
Speaker B:So again, like you say, it's about almost getting people to think, which I guess would probably be quite significant to the, you know, the man's world of sort of Bronze and Iron Age Greece, where it was all about the warrior of men going into battle and that sort of stuff.
Speaker B:Perhaps it's sort of a bit symbolic of this shift towards, you know, philosophy of the classical Greek era.
Speaker B:Perhaps that's just conjecture.
Speaker A:No, I think you're right.
Speaker A:And you talk about a patriarchal society, you've mentioned that before, but these are, these are traits that aren't typically patriarchal.
Speaker A:It's not about sort of.
Speaker A:It's about using, using as you say, creativity and, and trying to get this in, in the way that isn't totally brutish, you know, that you, that you sort of associate with, with that sort of, with that sort of way of thinking, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, precisely.
Speaker A:Fascinating.
Speaker A:Yeah, really interesting twist to it.
Speaker A:And you talk also about the Temple of Artemis and this keeps appearing in mythology.
Speaker A:It appears in, in the Olympus Vendetta is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
Speaker A:Artemis herself is a very fascinating figure.
Speaker A:What's that connection?
Speaker A:And what is the Temple of Artemis?
Speaker A:And where would we find it today if even that is a.
Speaker A:That is a possible thing.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:So.
Speaker B:Well, so the Temple of Artemis is one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, but unfortunately you can't visit it today because like all but one of the seven wonders, which being the Great Pyramid, the only one still standing, it was destroyed in antiquity, so there's nothing much left to see.
Speaker B:But it was at the, the site of Ephesus in modern day Turkey, which I think back then I think was clusters Anatolia, but I'm not wrong on that.
Speaker B:But yeah, Artemis herself, she's like, she's a really complex Olympian God, you know, as some of the others are fairly straightforward.
Speaker B:She's got a lot of sort of duality to.
Speaker B:To her role.
Speaker B:And she's the fiercely independent goddess of the.
Speaker B:The wilderness and the wild hunt.
Speaker B:And she becomes linked to.
Speaker B:To the moon.
Speaker B:So originally Selene is considered the moon goddess, but actually Artemis kind of takes on that role during some of the later Greek myths.
Speaker B:But her core societal role, if you like, was as the, the ultimate protector of women and young girls in childbirth.
Speaker B:If you were a woman in ancient Greece, Artemis was the dieter you turn to for sanctuary and for strength.
Speaker B:You know, there's no direct mythological connections that I found between Pandora and Artemis, but while I was sort of researching for the book, it just seemed really natural to me that the first woman ever created and the woman who is so personally.
Speaker B:And so by default, all of her descendants are all tarred by this brush of being the person who unleashed evil on mankind.
Speaker B:I just kind of feel like she would fall under Artemis's protection somewhere down the line.
Speaker B:And.
Speaker B:And the Temple of Artemis itself, according to the ancient sources, it was this architectural marvel.
Speaker B:It was four times bigger than the Athenian Parthenon that still stands in Athens today.
Speaker B:And it was the first temple to be Constructed entirely out of marble, and it had 127 colossal columns that were over 60ft tall.
Speaker B:So, you know, it's this really striking visual thing I really wanted to include in the Valhalla Key.
Speaker B:Sorry, no, in the Olympus Vendetto.
Speaker B:Apologies.
Speaker B:And yeah, I mean, I just think it's a fantastic thing to show there, but obviously it got destroyed.
Speaker B: the book based in, in sort of: Speaker B:But the, the important thing about the Temple of Artemis is that it was, it was literally a place of what's called Celia, which is the, the ancient origin of our modern word asylum.
Speaker B:So it was, it had this right of sanctuary that was legally, legally protected anyone within its sacred boundaries, but women in particular.
Speaker B:It protected them from arrest, from violence, from civic law.
Speaker B:And women would flee there from, from all over Greece and all over the known world.
Speaker B:According to legend, even the, the, the famous warrior women of the Amazons, they sought refuge there while fleeing from the, the wrath of Dionysus.
Speaker B:And it was overseen by, for that point in history, of really unique matriarchal religious hierarchy.
Speaker B:And it was actually modeled after the construction of a beehive where Artemis reigned as the supreme queen bee.
Speaker B:So it was very much.
Speaker B:Yeah, I wanted to include her to bring in this protection for women.
Speaker B:Links to Pandora.
Speaker A:Fantastic.
Speaker A:That's so interesting.
Speaker A:And that's sort of your antithesis to the patriarchal thing, isn't it?
Speaker A:This idea of this, the, the microcosm of society where it sort of flips that on its head and, and, and, and sees that in a different way.
Speaker A:I always feel disappointed about these seven wonders of the Ancient World that I'd love to go and see today.
Speaker A:And it must be wonderful to be able to create them in literature, you know, to bring them back in the way that you can imagine them, you know.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker B:The other, the other sort of thing, I included.
Speaker B:So when we were traveling in Rhodes a few years ago and we went to Manjaraki harbor, which is where the Colossus of Rhodes once stood.
Speaker B:And I mean, now obviously that, that was destroyed in an earthquake in something like 27 BC, but again, I could just picture it, you know, as we were sailing through on a. I think it was on ferry and then a little guide boat, and I could just kind of picture this massive statue made of bronze standing over the harbor.
Speaker B:And I thought, again, I want to include that on in a book, so to wangle that into the story as well in a bit of a roundabout way.
Speaker B:So yeah, like you say, it's those real striking visual elements.
Speaker B:When I'm writing those bits, I'm kind of putting myself into picturing it almost like a Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings type books.
Speaker B:You know, when you're looking at these big sweeping shots of these giant colossal things that you just can't see anymore.
Speaker A:Yeah, I know, I can imagine that and I love doing that myself.
Speaker A:I find that really interesting and sort of pulling that into the story in the way that you can.
Speaker A:Let's go back to Pandora again and think about her story with fresh eyes.
Speaker A:You know, with what we've talked about today, how she's a complex character, how she's, you know, set up to fail almost.
Speaker A:What is the story there?
Speaker A:What's that myth trying to tell us?
Speaker A:Do you think?
Speaker A:It's got a sort, has it got a morality sort of lesson?
Speaker A:Has it got a, is there a sort of warning in there?
Speaker A:Is there, is there a reason or something we could learn from that story, do you think?
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, definitely.
Speaker B:Like I said earlier, you know, there's almost this perception of her as this Stappy character, but she's not, she's very much the victim of the story and she's kind of like the ultimate historical scapegoat.
Speaker B:So the whole myth about Pandora, it was heavily popularized by Hesiod around the time of the Bronze Age collapse, which was a real life period where there was this massive social upheaval across the Mediterranean.
Speaker B:It coincided with things like the, the fall of the Minoan culture on Crete and the, the destruction of the Mycenaean culture of mainland Greece.
Speaker B:But there was also things like the attacks of the, the sea people against Egypt during the, the reign of.
Speaker B:I think it's Ramesses iii.
Speaker B:And there's so many things are all going on in, in this period.
Speaker B:The, the, the eruption of Pharaoh was around about that sort of period, give or take a few thousand years.
Speaker B:Sorry, a few hundred years.
Speaker B:So there was a lot going on as the Bronze Age was collapsing.
Speaker B:It wasn't like an overnight thing obviously, but there was this big societal shift from egalitarian goddess worshiping cultures like the Minoans, who were very, very heavily focused on female idols.
Speaker B:And it was shifted to this very Richard patriarchal system and it was dominated by your elite male warriors.
Speaker B:And I think, and lots of people seem to sort of agree with this while I've been researching the book, that men were looking for a narrative to justify stripping women of their societal power.
Speaker B:And Pandora was invented to do exactly that.
Speaker B:The message I think is pretty clear.
Speaker B:It was like, look what happens when a woman is left in charge of something important.
Speaker B:She ruins paradise.
Speaker B:And it's same anxieties played out in the founding myth of Athens where legend there says there was a contest between Athena and Poseidon to see who would patronize the city.
Speaker B:And all the women of Athens voted for Athena, all the men voted for Poseidon.
Speaker B:But because there was one more woman, Athena won.
Speaker B:Poseidon was a bit, you know, ticked off about this.
Speaker B:So he started slamming his weight around, throwing a few tsunamis, few earthquakes, just having a bit of a paddy.
Speaker B:And so the men of Athens ended up stripping the women of their right to vote.
Speaker B:They decreed that no child could ever bear the mother's name again to appease Poseidon.
Speaker B:And, and so again, it's a fairly similar sort of story there of men shifting the blame for what was going on in the world all to, to, to the women.
Speaker B:And, and that's where like that, that Artemis thing comes into it again.
Speaker B:So, you know, I think that's really what, what the ancient Greeks were doing.
Speaker B:Myths like Pandora and the vote of Athens, they weren't just like fun bedtime stories.
Speaker B:They were deliberate structural tools that were used to justify the subjugation of women and to explain the collapse of civilizations.
Speaker B:And, and yeah, in my book, I kind of treat Pandora not as the source of evil, but as the, the victim of.
Speaker B:The world's sort of like the ultimate propaganda campaign.
Speaker A:Yes, and it is exactly that, as you've said, a propaganda campaign based on someone who's got a specific aim.
Speaker A:You know, they want to achieve something.
Speaker A:So they, they, they set up this, this thing that, that, you know, that is, that has a certain result that makes people feel and think in a certain way.
Speaker A:And that's, yeah, that's fascinating and a really interesting way to think about it.
Speaker A:Right, because we think about these, these stories as sort of historical as opposed to written for a purpose.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah, that's right.
Speaker B:And, and it's only really in very recent years, decades, decades at best, that that agency of women has sort of begun to be examined more as, as different sort of feminist movements and not so much movements, but, but interpretations of these old sources that have always been interpreted by men, you know, that they're starting to, to come to the fore more.
Speaker B:And so it's starting to give the women agency.
Speaker B:And they're no longer just sort of just the, the scapegoats or they are the scapegoats, but it's now been recognized that that's what they were as opposed to for thousands of years.
Speaker B:It's just been, oh, yeah, they messed everything up.
Speaker B:And that gives men the right to rule the world.
Speaker B:Kind of is the core element of the story.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:Fascinating and so interesting because it's showing the importance of storytelling.
Speaker A:Right.
Speaker A:People can think that stories are just for entertainment.
Speaker A:You know, we're both writers, we write stories for entertainment.
Speaker A:But of course they're more than that.
Speaker A:They are doing this.
Speaker A:You are perpetrating a narrative not just of the characters in the book, but of your worldview and your understanding of things.
Speaker A:And that's a real, a real important job to have, I think.
Speaker B:Yeah, definitely, definitely.
Speaker A:So I've had to change this final question because you've been on the podcast before, which.
Speaker A:And I'm gonna make it sort of focus it a little bit more on what we've been talking about today because you mentioned earlier, and I love that idea that you were interested in these legends and myths as a young boy and now you've got sons and you're sort of imparting that interest on them.
Speaker A:But what specific stories or what part of this, of, of this whole, this whole fascinating world first sparked your interest in it and first sort of led you down this path to begin with?
Speaker B:So the, I mean, my earliest memories of like the Greek myths is very much the old stop motion movies of like Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts.
Speaker B:You know, the ones with the, the skeletons that come to life and you know, the big lizards, a bit like the old land that time forgot type thing with the, you know, where they use an iguana to be a T. Rex and that sort of stuff.
Speaker B:So it's made in the 60s or something like that.
Speaker B:And they're so cheesy and corny by today's standards.
Speaker B:But I remember watching them with my parents when I was young.
Speaker B:And even though the special effects are something to be desired, unless you're really into, you know, proper fictionado of stop motion, then it's, it's just the stories there that, you know, you cut through the special effects, you cut through the fantastical elements and you've got these stories of adventurers and they were, you know, they were going out like Jason and the Argonauts in particular.
Speaker B:You know, the route, if you, if you actually plot his route, which I did a while back, just, just for fun, really, just because I got quite interested in Jason's story and I was trying to work out where he went and plotting it all around the Mediterranean and up into sort of modern Germany and those sort of areas and then down they end up going to the land of the Hesperides actually, which they base in Morocco.
Speaker B:And so yeah, it's this idea of, of adventure and it's the, the old school sort of adventure where you, you go out into the wilderness and there was no, no help.
Speaker B:They didn't have, you know, fleets coming in to, to help save the day.
Speaker B:That was just Jason and his, his band of Argonauts and you know, they, they're very much my, my earliest memories of them.
Speaker B:And, and then I, I remember reading there's a series of books by the Stephan who are two Greek brothers and I think one of them wrote the books and one of them did some illustrations for them and they've been translated into, to English and they're written for children, but like a lot of ancient Greek stuff, some of the subject matter by today's standards, you think, you know, it's a bit, bit R rated for, for a child's book.
Speaker B:Yeah, those bits when retelling them to her sons.
Speaker B:But it literally, I think there's about nine books in the series and they go from the, the creation of the gods in the battle with the Titans right through to when humans stopped worshiping the gods and tells the stories of Heracles and Jason and Achilles and Troy and all these great things there.
Speaker B:And yeah, my boys, they love them.
Speaker B:Well, my eldest one, I've read quite a few of those books too and my youngest one definitely will be reading them too in the not too distant future.
Speaker B:They reenact the stories now, which is obviously my fault.
Speaker B:We traveled around Greece over the last few years and they're just infatuated with the stories, probably even more than I am actually.
Speaker B:And they have like some of their Playmobil stuff.
Speaker B:They got like a model of the, the Argo and they send it off on these adventures replicating these stories that I tell them.
Speaker B: ntastic when you think in, in: Speaker A:Yes.
Speaker A:And I love that you can have that as a child, you can see this story as a, in one sense, but yet when you dip into it now as an adult, you can see it in a slightly different way.
Speaker A:Like there are different levels, there are different layers of meaning within the story that you can, that you can interpret or that you can understand.
Speaker A:Dependent on, you know, dependent on how much you know and your, and your worldview and these sorts of things.
Speaker A:And that's a true story.
Speaker A:That's a lovely bit of a.
Speaker A:That's a true test of a story, I suppose, is what I'm trying to say.
Speaker B:Yes, yes it is.
Speaker B:Yeah, yeah.
Speaker B:To have all those layers to peel back and be interpreted in lots of different ways.
Speaker B:Yeah,.
Speaker A:Yeah.
Speaker A:James, tell us about the Olympus Vendetta.
Speaker B:Okay, so the Olympus Vendetta, like you said earlier, Jack Jackson rain, who's a PI in now in 19.
Speaker B: l there's a crossover between: Speaker B:What doesn't end up in Greece?
Speaker B:Actually a big chunk of it takes place in Greece and it ties in.
Speaker B:Yeah, the idea of Pandora and Adam and Eve.
Speaker B:We visit places like Patmos, which is where the cave of the apocalypse is where the book of Revelation was written.
Speaker B:And we've got the villains, we've got you, you've got your Nazis in there, you know, the same as the Valhalla Key, which was the first one, but we also introduced the, the Inquisition which is a, a continuation of the Spanish Inquisition.
Speaker B:They're very fanatical views and wanting to take control of this story before Jack can, can reveal it.
Speaker B:We've got the story of Pandora intersecting with, with Heracles.
Speaker B:And one of my favorite things about it was just really writing the places I've been to so fairly recently, like Tindos, which is this little island just off the coast of Kilimlos.
Speaker B:And it's just one of those little places.
Speaker B:And I'm sure you've done this as well, Luke, where I visited it and I just fell in love with it and I thought that's gonna born a book.
Speaker B:It's just, just ideal for it.
Speaker B:Yeah.
Speaker B:And it's a, a good old fashioned adventure with lots of action, lots of, lots of humor, hopefully lots of daring do.
Speaker B:And hopefully a lot of heart is how I like to think of it.
Speaker B:So a lot going on in it, but at the core of it, for having a good time to escape, you know, some of the pressures of the modern world, to sit down on the beach or in your favorite armchair and really jump into.
Speaker A:Love it.
Speaker A:James, that's wonderful.
Speaker A:Thanks so much.
Speaker B:Thank you very much.
Speaker B:Thanks for having me.
Speaker A:So fascinating and a reminder there, I think, about the power of stories.
Speaker A:As a writer myself, I, I love to think about stories being more than just entertainment, right?
Speaker A:And maybe that's my own sort of self importance speaking, but that seems to be so true in our conversation there.
Speaker A:You know, you can think about Pandora's story in the idea of this sort of cautionary tale, right?
Speaker A:This fun thing to share, to share like a, just a bit of entertainment, but yet like James and I did there, you can unpack it and talk about sort of the, the, the patriarchal society and the criticism of that and all of these things and how your perceptions of that can change over time.
Speaker A:Really, really fascinating thing.
Speaker A:So James's books are available wherever books are sold.
Speaker A:The first one in the series is the Valhalla Key.
Speaker A:The second one which we were talking about today is the Olympus Vendetta.
Speaker A:You can read them out of order should you want.
Speaker A:They are sort of self contained mysteries, but always reading in a series to get the full experience.
Speaker A:I think start with the beginning and move on forwards.
Speaker A:That's how I would recommend it.
Speaker A:Anyway, as always, thank you so much for hanging out today.
Speaker A:It's been wonderful to spend some time with you.
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Speaker A:There's a link, as always in the show notes.
Speaker A:And if you're a fan of adventure stories like the one we've talked about today, I would love for you to check out my books.
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Speaker A:Enjoy the adventure and I'll see you next time.
