Original subtitles

(choir sings hymn)

Here at New College, in the University of Oxford,

the Christian God has been praised in chapel

for 600 continuous years.

The God of this hymn is the Creator.

Before Him there was nothing.

The ancient Greeks sang hymns

for their gods, too.

But these gods were more like aristocrats in heaven.

Greek culture had a very different idea

of divinity from our own.

The Greeks believed there were many gods,

and although Zeus ruled,

there had been battles before he established himself

and there was still an uneasy peace

in heaven.

And man's suffering and misfortune

was often just damage

spilling over from the quarrels of the gods.

I teach Ancient History

here at New College, Oxford.

Throughout my life,

I've been fascinated by the Greek myths,

by their tales of those tragic heroes,

by the loves and personalities of the gods,

and their battles with monsters

or even with one another.

Myths are stories without known authors,

and I've always wondered

where do they come from?

In the first program

I revealed how the Greek myths

of their gods' battles in heaven

were shaped by the minds of particular people,

living at a time which has been described

as a dark age,

from the 10th century BC onwards.

These Euboeans were the great travelers

of the Greek age.

They traveled east across the Aegean,

and settled near a mountain in modern Turkey.

By them it was called Mount Cassius,

and here they learnt from the locals

details of much older myths.

Myths which became part of the Greeks'

own ideas

of how the ruling order of the gods in heaven

was established.

In this film,

I'm going to find out more

about these remarkable people.

I'll trace the fragile Euboean origins

of the alphabet and Western literature.

This is huge.

This is really the beginning

of literate Western civilization for us

and we're witnessing it

in the palm of your hand.

I'm going to uncover a hidden inscription

which tells an extraordinary story.

This really is the lifeblood of ancient history,

and we're finding it straight in front of us.

And I will show how the Euboean discoveries

among the myths

gave us more tales of battles in heaven.

On their journeys,

they found evidence of monstrous enemies

to their ruling god Zeus.

I will enter the underground lair

of a terrifying snaky monster,

and locate his final explosive resting place.

He's really steaming this morning,

he's hotting up,

he's been blazing away for

oh about 5,000 years, still not exhausted.

And I will visit a place where the Euboeans' past

is still thrillingly mirrored in our world.

My journey starts on the home island

of these remarkable people.

The island of Euboea was known to the Greeks

as "long island".

To reach it from mainland Greece,

you can cross by a short ferry ride.

By the late eighth century BC

the settlement of Eretria

was one of the most powerful in all Euboea.

What is interesting here

is the first buildings in the area

which go back to the eighth century BC

and it's one of the first urban sanctuaries

known in the Greek world.

And that is a sanctuary temple

built in the middle of the community's

area of residence.

Exactly, it was a city.

It was 35 meters long--

God, that's enormous!

It's enormous.

So it was built by a community.

Quite important community.

The first probably communal building

of the Eretrians.

We've found a lot of pits inside the building

and outside the building as well,

filled with thousands of skyphi and also kraters.

These are all cups and bowls for drinking

so they're getting slightly tight,

telling stories, some of the myths about Apollo

sing a hymn, maybe,

perhaps praising him, asking for favors

or cursing him if he's being difficult,

and then they deposit the vessels

and leave them there and you again find them

2,800 years later.

Yes, and that's where all the imports were found.

When I talk about imports I mean

objects that come from the Near East

and also Egypt,

scarabs, seals, small bronzes.

Here in the storerooms of the Eretria Museum,

the shelves are crammed with boxes,

full of objects excavated

by the Swiss School of Archaeology.

These finds have given us a clearer picture

of the lives of our Euboean travelers,

and the culture in which

the myths we will trace were born.

Okay Robin, I wanted to show you here

two sherds with the graffiti.

Early wtiting.

Writing, early writing.

They were found in the Sanctuary of Apollo.

The first one's dated from the end of the ninth century,

early eighth century.

We can see four letters.

Well they're not Greek.

I can't understand them.

What are they?

They're Semitic.

Good heavens.

So this is at the turning point

when some Near Easterner has either

taught a Euboean to write,

or a Euboean is copying what he's learned,

perhaps in the Near East.

Absolutely.

But it was carved on a Euboean pot,

this is a typical Euboean drinking cup.

We're right at the start of the origin of writing.

Extraordinary, yes.

And at the end of the series,

we have again a graffito carved

on a local pot, Euboean,

with another four letters.

I think I can read it,

it's " heerah"

"Heeray"

"Heeray", it's four Greek letters.

So what we have is a real moment of transition,

we have somebody trying to write Greek

in a non-Greek alphabet,

and then we have Greek written

in the real Greek alphabet.

This is an enormous important change.

This is really the root

of all Western civilization.

I mean the Greek alphabet,

we have then the Roman alphabet,

the Etruscan alphabet, our alphabet.

If they couldn't write,

we wouldn't know anything about them.

If they couldn't write down Homer,

we wouldn't be able to read his poems,

we wouldn't know anything about Hesiod.

This is a real change for people,

and we're witnessing it in the palm of your hand.

Incredible.

Now, I want to show you these two seals

which belong to the lyre player group.

Five of them were found in the Sanctuary of Apollo.

They were found in the northern sacrificial area,

and where a cult is established,

a cult linked with women.

It's like a calling card for Euboean women.

Absolutely.

Talking about Euboean women in the eighth century

we have here the neck of an amphora.

Oh there they are!

Dancing.

Yes, or it's a procession.

And they're holding garlands, it looks like,

in these very trendy skirts.

They've had to breathe in for the painter, anyway.

Tight waists, long skirts,

eighth century BC fashion.

Wonderful.

This is part of a krater, Robin,

where you have the typical Euboean

eighth century iconography,

with a horse.

Spindly legs, yes, there he is.

The four-legged friend.

And these aren't farm animals, are they, Silvian?

They don't pull carts, they can't.

They haven't got the right collar.

These horses, they're used for competition,

and above all for war.

This is a sign of social distinction,

it's not just they love animals.

You're smart, you're a nobleman,

you're one of the horse-breeders.

the local cavalry, wonderful.

Now this was found in the west quarter

in Eretria,

and it's a very important find.

And it's a monumental amphora.

Right, which stood then by a grave,

would that be right? Exactly.

And I can see a chariot,

it's this sort of chariot race,

on this bit is somebody

they're trying to jump off and on

the back of the chariot.

The apobates.

Yep, it's a sort of Greek game they play,

where the skill is to jump onto a chariot

when it's moving and jump off the back of it.

Probably during funerary games.

Fantastic.

In the Greek Dark Ages,

Euboeans were not only renowned for their horsemanship,

their soil was fertile,

especially for the cultivation of grapes.

(harvesters brushing leaves)

(plates clinking)

During the grape harvest nowadays,

families traditionally gather at the end of work

to eat and of course to drink.

And to swap stories,

as their Euboean predecessors also did.

We can imagine Euboean travelers

fresh from a journey to the East

full of stories and observations

about gods and goddesses.

And the wine made here

was an important item in the trade

that had sent them sailing eastward.

(wineglasses ring)

The ground, the soil, is the best here in Euboea for wine?

Yes, it's a very good ground

because here it's--

It's rich.

It's rich, yes, it's very rich.

Very rich.

You live the year of the poet Hesiodos.

Hesiod tells us we pick the grapes in mid-September,

like you, and in mid-July,

we cut the corn when the goats are very fat,

the wine is very good,

and the women are very sexy.

Oh!

But the poor men are exhausted.

Not by the women, but by the heat!

(laughter)

The great Greek poet Hesiod

was alive when the settlement of Eretria

was at its peak.

His main poetic legacy however,

is not his account of the tribulations

of a farmer's life.

He was, above all, the poet of battles in heaven,

told in his poem "The Theogony".

He performed it at a competition in Euboea.

And in it, Hesiod tells us

that the ruling god of the Greeks, Zeus,

was challenged by a snaky monster, Typhon.

so large that his head brushed the sky.

When Hesiod performed his prize poem,

its first verses about Typhon, I believe,

will particularly have caught

his Euboean audience's attention.

They may even have given him more details

after the performance.

For there were Euboeans there

who knew so much more than Hesiod

about Typhon.

They had tracked him, they believed,

from one end of the Mediterranean,

right across to the other.

I even believe that the Euboeans' bigger picture

of Typhon may have been incorporated later

by Hesiod into his Theogony.

So I've traveled to Mount Cassius

in modern Turkey, on the Euboeans' trail,

in order to discover the roots of their knowledge

about the monster.

In the Greek Dark Ages,

when our Euboeans journeyed eastward,

in the shadow of Mt. Cassius,

they settled at Al Mina.

Mt. Cassius was a holy mountain for the Hittites.

The Hittites' empire had fallen around 1200 BC,

some 400 years before Euboeans settled here.

At its peak, the Hittite empire had ruled

a vast swathe of what is now modern Turkey.

Their cultural influence survived

their empire's fall.

When Euboeans arrived, it was still present

in local myths and religion.

Just as they had adopted the myth

of the castration of Father Heaven by Kronos,

explored in my first film,

the Euboeans adopted a local Hittite story

heard on this mountain.

A story which gave them the details

of the myth of their Zeus against Typhon.

Here they learned about the past struggles

of the Hittite gods

and the defeat of the ruling god Kumarbi

by his son, Tarhunta.

In revenge, Kumarbi raised up a series of monsters,

including the serpent-monster Hedammu.

The story of Hedammu has recently been pieced together

from fragmentary Hittite tablets,

but we also now know that it was part

of the ancient Song of Kingship,

sung by choirs on the very slopes of this mountain.

And here is the king of Hittite gods himself,

Tarhunta,

the storm god who fought a snake monster,

just like his Greek counterpart Zeus.

Around the bay from Mount Cassius

in this ruined fortress of Karatepe,

his statue still stands.

As the worn inscription on it reveals

in the ninth and eight century BC,

the end of the Greek Dark Ages,

the House of Muksas ruled this region,

what we know as Cilicia.

The kingdom was one of several

which had succeeded the Hittite empire.

We know that these neo-Hittites

maintained some of the older empire's

gods and traditions.

It's unlikely that our Euboeans came up

to this palace,

but clear evidence of their connection

to its region lie in reliefs

found alongside the statue.

Near 3,000 year old scenes of a royal banquet

with servants bringing food and drink

to the seated ruler.

Under his table cowers a monkey.

There are scenes of hunting involving lions,

and in one relief, a bear.

A bowman stands waiting,

and under a palm tree

a mother suckles a child

while a procession of musicians

play their instruments,

a drum, lyres and a flute.

These palace reliefs are extremely revealing

details in them connect exactly with imagery

on the seals which Sylvian showed me

in Eretria on Euboea.

The style matches some of the imagery

of those small seals.

The table, the chair, the lyre player,

all of these were used by the seal makers,

reflecting a style which would have been widespread

across the land of King Muksas,

that the Euboeans were seeing all around them.

We know that these neo-Hittites

maintained some of the older empire's

gods and traditions,

and it was through them that Euboeans

heard the story of the Hittite snake monster

were even able to locate

the creature's mythical lair,

a place that became the home of their Typhon, too.

The coastal kingdom of the House of Muksas

included ravines to the southwest of Karatepe.

Turks now call them the Caves of Heaven and Hell.

This fearsome abyss has been hollowed out

over thousands of years by the rivers

and it drops straight down for hundreds of feet.

It's still known in Turkish as Cehennem.

That's Gehenna, or Hell,

in Muslim and Christian tradition

and it really would be hell now

to try to get to the bottom.

Fortunately Heaven doesn't require a climbing rope.

It's a few hundred meters from Hell,

where stairs lead down into a ravine.

In ancient times, saffron crocuses grew here,

objects of cult for the ancient Hittites.

Modern Turks named this place Cennet,

Heaven.

But beyond Heaven is the underground lair of a monster.

One of the stories we have of the Hittite snake monster

is that at first it defeated the storm god Tarhunta

then stole his eyes and heart,

which it hid in a cave.

In later Greek myth,

Zeus too is defeated at first

by the snaky monster,

in Greek, Typhon, on Mount Cassius itself,

we're told,

and Typhon cuts away the god's sinews

using an adamantine sickle,

wraps them up in a basket

and conceals them in his lair,

the Corycian cave.

If we consider the story in its real context,

we can understand for the first time

how and when the story passed to the Greeks

and then grew.

Visible beyond the remains of this Christian church,

is the Corycian cave of the Greek myth.

At its mouth, there's actually an inscription

which identifies it,

although it dates from some 600 years

after the Greek Dark Ages.

To protect it from damage it has been concealed,

and its location is known only to the cave's

Turkish guardian, Hazir.

He's agreed to uncover it for me.

I'm the first scholar to see it in years.

In 1896 an inscription was reported here.

It's absolutely thrilling we've managed to find it again.

As far as I can see, beautifully cut Greek lettering.

This really is the lifeblood of ancient history.

This is what we rely on,

and we're finding it straight in front of us,

and it looks as though it's lines of verse

by one Eupaphis,

who is in the dells of

and the cave,

we'll have to wait till the lines are clearer.

After a couple of hours of digging,

all four lines of verse are revealed.

Wary of going into the depths,

Eupaphis wrote his verses

and had them inscribed on this beautifully dressed stone.

And what he tells us is so important

for fixing its context.

He tells us how "I honored and propitiated

"the gods Pan and Hermes,"

now that's immensely important

because in the story, precisely Pan and Hermes

are the gods who rescue the stolen sinews of Zeus,

so this is the cave, certainly, where it happened.

And he calls it "ein Arimois", in Arima,

a name which is going to be so important

for our Greek travelers,

but which also ties up with the Hittite place name

here, Erimma on the map,

and he describes how he "entered the depths",

which are "echoing with the sounds of the streams

"of the River Aous."

So when he was in the bottom,

he heard the echoing noise of the river.

The Arima cave is a quarter of a kilometer deep.

As I descend, I well understand

the dark, demonic nature of this cave

in the ancients' imagination.

Arima was a continuing place of pilgrimage

for Greeks and then Romans.

A continuity, I believe, which goes right back

to the age of the Neo-Hittites

and even earlier.

And like those ancient pilgrims,

at the bottom I find my way is blocked.

And beyond, the river Aous

does indeed echo.

When I hear the sound of the river

behind the rocks

as it snakes its way down into the next world

I realize we have elements

of immense religious significance

for the ancient Hittites.

Every year the Hittite king

would hold rites and a festival

at the watery abysses,

that (mumbles) throughout his kingdom

to assure his control over the waters of the land.

And here, the Neo-Hittite king, centuries later,

the sons of Muksas,

had exactly the site at which to maintain

those same rites and festivals

that were part of the tradition.

And it is through knowledge of the hymns

and the stories told 'round the cave

that Euboean Greeks became aware

of the snaky monster here,

whom they turned into Typhon.

And at the mouth of the cave,

visible proof of the continuing power of the myth.

This church was built in the fifth century AD

using the stones of an earlier pagan

Greek temple dedicated to Zeus

and marking his battle against Typhon.

By building a church in ancient Erimma,

the early Christians had a clear purpose.

It is a fine tribute to the power

of the pagan gods and monsters

we've met in the cave behind.

It sets straight across the opening

of the Corycian cave

to cancel them out, a deliberate counterweight,

dedicated to the Virgin Mary.

We should think of Christian pilgrims

coming once a year

all the way down to this very inaccessible place

to celebrate the Christian liturgy

knowing that they were now safe

from the demons, from Typhon,

the terrible Typhon in the cave behind.

In the Greek myths, with his stolen body parts restored

Zeus hurled thunderbolts and lightning

against the monster.

It was believed that traces of his mythical fight

could be found elsewhere in Cilicia.

Just to the northeast of the caves,

there's another huge ravine known nowadays

as Kanlidivane, meaning " the crazy place of blood".

In the third century AD,

the Greek poet Oppian served as a priest of the gods

at the nearby Corycian Cave.

And Oppian tells us how Zeus

took the monster Typhon and battered him

all the length of the seashore,

hitting his hundred heads against the rocks.

And he goes on, even now, the tawny banks

and rocks run red with the blood

from Typhon's heads.

Standing here, I can see exactly

what the local poet meant.

The rocks seem stained

with conspicuous streaks of red,

especially now, as the light fades.

From the fifth century AD onwards,

the Christians built no less than four

basilica churches by the rim of this ravine.

No text survives to explain this surge

of new Christian building

but pagan buildings had existed on this site.

At this ravine, just as at the cave in Erimma,

the churches were built as a counterweight,

designed to cancel the traces of Typhon's

demonic blood,

an old cult of Zeus at the ravine itself.

Kanlidivane's stained with blood,

but it cannot be Typhon's last resting place.

He was far too big,

his head brushed the stars,

his arms spread out across east and west,

he had a hundred hissing heads.

He needed somewhere far bigger.

So where was he then?

Euboeans would have wondered.

He had to have a resting place

commensurate with his size,

one which measured up to the great cosmic war

with the great majesty of Zeus himself.

On their travels, Euboeans were to find

just such a place,

away at the furthest edge of the Greek world.

In the mid eighth century BC,

the Euboeans founded settlements

on the island of Sicily's eastern shore,

and every day, dominating the view

was the great volcano Mount Etna.

This is an eerie, dangerous place.

Climbers like me have to be accompanied

by a guide.

These fumes can choke unwary travelers,

and up here, the wind can change in an instant.

How did early Greeks explain

this extraordinary burnt landscape?

By myth, the very myth Euboeans had met in the east.

Euboeans reasoned that the victorious Zeus

had scorched Typhon on these very slopes

and below us the monster is imprisoned

and being lashed in punishment.

And when he tosses and turns,

his fiery anger erupts.

300 years after the first Euboean

settled in this mountain's shadow,

the great Greek poet Pindar

witnessed an eruption and described it here

belching out streams of unapproachable fire.

The writhings of the monster.

Well this is Typhon's latest hole,

blasted in 1968, quite amazing.

I think you have to remember the poet Pindar

[speaking in Greek]

And during the day he sends out

rivers of blazing smoke.

And I think that Pindar the poet

in the 470s BC stood pretty near here

and then the whole thing exploded,

[speaks Greek] into the sea,

and the rocks came down with a crash.

That is wonderful, he's really steaming this morning,

he's hotting up under there.

He's been blazing away for about 5,000 years,

still not exhausted.

There's a great argument as to whether

myth is contrary to reason.

If you stand here, nonsense.

Myth makes perfect sense.

There's no application,

no opposition between the two.

In the Greek imagination

the myth of Typhon did not end on Etna.

Euboeans had found signs of his presence

north of Sicily.

In their journey westward,

our traveling heroes had sailed

through the Straits of Messina

and along Italy's coast.

Even before they founded their Sicilian colonies,

Euboeans had traveled as far north

as the Bay of Naples.

Etruscans were present in the area

so at first, Euboeans avoided settling on the mainland.

Instead they headed out to an island beyond the bay.

This is the island which the Euboeans

chose to settle,

known nowadays as Ischia.

But they called it Pithecusae,

which in Greek means "monkey island".

Zoologists claim that in early times

there were no monkeys here,

and nowadays it's crawling with tourists.

The ferry journey from Naples takes less than an hour.

Hundreds of thousands of holidaymakers

visit the little island for its health spas and beaches.

We can follow Euboeans in the west

with the help of ancient texts

supported by archaeological evidence

which suggests they arrived on Ischia

about 770 BC.

And if correct, that's very soon

after they had settled at Al Mina in the east.

They found Ischia thinly inhabited,

so they settled beside this cove.

And a local name for the island

would have caught their attention.

In Etruscan, it meant "monkey",

and the word, no less, was Arima.

Out east in Cilicia in Turkey,

they had come from one Arima,

the cave in which Typhon had hidden

the body parts of Zeus.

And now they'd traveled to their furthest point west

and had landed on yet another Arima.

Was Typhon to be seen here too?

Yes, if they looked carefully,

even at the beach.

Because on the ground, the sand here

is dark and volcanic,

as if Typhon himself has been active.

It must have seemed heaven-sent,

an omen from the gods.

Overlooking the cove is the hill of Monte Vico,

just the place for a Greek acropolis.

On it, hot springs serve as a bathing spa.

For the Greeks too, they steamed up from the ground.

As on Etna, the cause seemed obvious.

Why, the Euboeans reasoned, it was Typhon,

imprisoned below.

The monster, they imagined, was so large

that he lay stretched all they way from Ischia

to volcanic Sicily, far across the sea.

In his Iliad, Homer compares the sound

of the Greek army's first advance on Troy

to the crashing sound when Zeus lashes Typhon.

In Arima, Homer says, where they say is Typhon's bed.

Homer was composing, I believe,

around 750 BC.

By Arima, he meant exactly Ischia.

Word of it had derived ultimately from Euboeans.

The archaeological finds made on the island

are now housed in the Pithecusae Museum.

Among the objects here

are more of the tiny lyre-players' seals

which I saw in Eretria with Sylvian,

whose style in stones have been traced exactly

to Cilicia in modern Turkey,

the very region of Typhon's lair.

The seals were buried here in the graves of young children.

This is a Near-Eastern practice,

and suggests to me that the mothers

may well have come with Euboean partners

from the Near East.

The director of the museum is

Profesore Giovanni Castagna,

and his most important treasure

is this drinking cup.

It too was made in the eastern Mediterranean

brought out here,

and later buried in a small boy's grave

around 725 BC.

Ah, this Greek inscription for me, Profesore,

is so suggestive,

because it is written in the characteristic script

of the Euboeans,

and there are the three lines in verse,

and at least I think

that this is the world's first literary allusion,

because the inscription says

[speaking in Greek]

"I am the cup of Nestor, good to drink with

"and whoever drinks from this cup

"will be seized by the love-desire

"of Aphrodite the goddess of love."

Now in Homer's poems,

we know of the old hero Nestor.

Whenever he picks up his big cup

as an old man,

he talks for line after line,

giving advice, he's rather boring.

And this is a witty allusion on a person's cup

saying "I am Nestor's cup" but

unlike the one in Homer,

if you drink from me, you will fall in love.

Amazing.

It makes us realize that the Homeric poems

about the nobles and the heroes

were not confined only to the aristocratic classes.

This is not a very grand grave,

and yet the owner of the cup

believes that everyone has Homer on the brain,

like you and me.

It's wonderful.

[speaking in Italian]

Oh! Thank you so much!

Emboldened by their settlement on Ischia,

a group of Euboeans then set out to settle

across the Bay of Naples.

Here with Ischia visible on the horizon,

they founded the first Greek settlement

on the mainland of modern Italy,

Cumae.

Cumae has a magnificent stretch of farmland

and was to remain a center of Greek influence

for more than a thousand years.

But the better farming and the greater space were not,

I think, their only reasons for settling here.

On rocky islands, as Homer remarks in the Odyssey,

there is no scope for using fine horses.

Unlike Ischia, Cumae had a flat beach

which was a horse lover's dream.

And it still is.

This beach is near the Agnado Hippodrome,

a racecourse for Italian trotting horses.

Every morning their trainers exercise them here

much as Euboeans did in the past.

Horse harness and chariot fittings

have been found in Euboean graves at Cumae.

The top trainer here is Vincenzo Palumbo.

He's agreed to let me have a go.

Horses and riding are my lifelong loves

back in Britain.

The Euboean Greeks I'm sure came here

and they would have practiced on the sand

with their horses in chariots,

exactly as we do.

The sand gives more strength to the horse's exercise,

like Olympic runners

and then we can imagine them all lining the beach,

cheering on as the horses come

either at the gallop or in the chariot.

And of course they do that trick of jumping

on and off,

that we saw with the apobates on the pottery

in Eretria.

Horses were not just bred for the apobates race

so vividly painted on pottery I saw at

Eretria's museum.

For aristocrats, they were both a status symbol

and a devastating weapon in war.

In the eighth century BC,

Euboeans were the finest of all Greek riders

and horsebreeders.

They even named their children after horses.

One of the two founders of Cumae

was a Euboean named Hippocles,

and hippos is Greek for horse.

Once settled in Cumae,

the Euboeans found yet more evidence

of battles in heaven,

which established the power of Zeus.

The myths tell how after the defeat of Typhon

there was a new challenge against the gods,

a tribe of insolent, enormous giants.

Just inland from Cumae,

Euboeans actually located the field

of the giants' battle.

They called this place Phlegra,

which means flaming.

We can still see what the ancients described

the wounds of the thunderbolted giants

which pour out streams of fire and water.

These sulfurous fumaroles are not

the only peculiar element.

The surface here at Phlegra feels to me

remarkably thin.

In the late 18th century,

the scholar and diplomat Sir William Hamilton

came to much the same conclusion,

and he decided to test it by an experiment.

He thought he'd try dropping a stone

and listening to the sound it made.

So I'm going to try dropping this one

and if I don't drop it on my feet

we'll see what kind of a sound we get.

(rock thuds) (thud echoes)

Exactly what Hamilton heard,

an echo, which he thought was the echo

of a subterranean vault

which was seething with fire and boiling with water.

But what I think is what the ancient Greeks

and the ancient Euboeans who visited here believed

is the subterranean vault of a vast underground prison

in which the giants are lying, scalded and wounded,

fuming and furious at their final defeat

by the Olympian gods.

The ancients also believed that the base camp

of the battling giants could be found.

They located it too in Phlegra,

but curiously, the Phlegra to which they refer

is hundreds of miles from this unearthly landscape.

North of their home island,

the Euboeans found the three prongs

of the Calcidic peninsula.

The westernmost prong they called the second Phlegra.

Beside this fine beach,

Euboeans founded the settlement of Mende

around 730 BC.

The first settlers were aware of the Phlegra

near Cumae.

The transfer of the name Phlegra here is most odd.

The peninsula is not at all volcanic.

Greek authors are clear that it was the base camp

for the giants before their final battle

in the west.

In recent years we have begun to understand why.

This is the most unlikely site.

How did you ever come to discover

there were things to excavate here?

It was an accidental finding of this site.

When a walker found a very interesting

specimen of an hipparion.

That is an ancient horse, isn't it?

It is an ancient three-toed horse.

Evangelia Tsoukala is a paleontologist.

With her team, she has been excavating this hillside

near Mende

and has made some remarkable discoveries.

I can show here a very extraordinary bone.

It's the biggest thing I've ever seen!

It is a femur of a mastodon.

Oh my goodness, what is it?

It is an ancestor of the mammoth.

Ah, right.

I mean if I look at it, knowing nothing,

I might think this was the bone of some

enormously heavyweight human.

The imagination of the layman is incredible

and I have an example from my excavation

in Grevena with the huge mastodons there,

and the people there thought that they come

from an elephant from a circus.

From a circus! And they'd escaped.

But you persuaded them.

After 20 years, yes.

This hillside has already produced many other

giant prehistoric bones.

They must have been a race of gigantic people.

What I'm thinking is that the Greeks,

the Euboeans who had been out in Naples

and had seen the shattered remains

of the battlefield where the gods

had zapped the giants with thunderbolts

I can now understand why they come up here

and they think this is the camp,

this is where the giants bred,

where they lived.

And once you see it,

you can see what the Euboeans concluded.

Those things are far bigger than me,

they're proof.

The poets knew.

These are giants.

And this is why the whole story

is partly located here

and partly located on the smoldering volcanoes

in Italy.

From one Phlegra to the other,

across a vast expanse of sea,

Euboeans linked the evidence they saw

and made sense of it through myth.

In the same pattern of Euboean travel and inquiry,

we can discern the origin of central Greek myths

about the gods.

In the Near East, below Mount Cassius,

Euboeans had heard the amazing tales

of the battle for the kingship of heaven,

of the castrating sickle and the shower

of a god's sperm.

They heard stories of a stone swallowed in error,

and the ruling god of storms and weather.

And they traced that ruling god's great battle

with a snaky monster across the world.

In the Near East,

these stories were linked to religious rituals.

Euboeans adopted them as stories,

simply muthoi.

And as true traveling heroes,

they found yet more evidence of these myths

across the wine-dark sea.

They found a goddess born from heaven's sperm

in Cyprus,

a mountain which was their ruling god's nursery,

a swallowed stone in holy Delphi,

and the snaky monster steaming

under volcanic Ischia and Etna.

And the defeated giants sweating

under their western battlefield,

and leaving bones on their northern base camp.

These myths were not the random fantasies

of unconscious minds,

they were rooted in Euboeans' experience

of real places and real people.

What they learned in the east,

they found far away in the west,

and through them, these great myths about the gods

became central to Greek religion

literature and art,

from where they live on,

still vivid, in our world.