The Problem with Greek Myth Retellings

[Music] giving voice to a woman condemned by history this debut is an epic feminist retelling of the story of notorious Spartan Queen clestra this feminist retelling of Greek mythology reimagines the story of anas and the women once left at the fringes of his story a powerful feminist retelling of fedra and her undying Quest For Justice a mesmorizing retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Theus and the minor the heroins is a powerful reimagining Greek tragedy a powerful feminist retelling of an ancient tale a dazzling feminist retelling of Greek myth a brilliant new voice reveals the

untold story behind the Trojan War for readers of meline Miller and Clare Haywood comes the story of the most infamous monster of Greek mythology Medusa breathes new life into an ancient story and Echoes the battle that women throughout Millennia a story that has waited Millennia to be told for Millennia men have told the legend of the woman whose face launched a thousand ships but now it's time to hear her side of the story [Music] it's safe to say we're currently living through a bit of a Greek mythology Revival if you visit the new release section

in any Bookshop you'll almost guaranteed to see at least one Greek mythology retelling or for that matter if your book shop has a book talk table you're likely to see a number of these titles as well in the wake of the success of Steven Fry's take on Greek mythology and the rediscovery of Adine Miller's the song of Achilles first published in 2011 but hugely popularized on book talk a wealth of novels retellings or reimaginings of Greek mythology have hit the shelves Greek mythology is a particularly marketable genre but it is important to note that Mythic

retellings are nothing new Margaret Atwood and Ursula klewin were writing reimaginings in the 2000s Mary reenal and Robert Graves were popular for their Mythic and historical retellings in the mid 20th century and the sword and sandal films was an immensely profitable genre for Hollywood during the 50s and 60s with films like Hercules and Jason and the Argonauts even back in the early 19th century the Romantic Poets like Shelly and Keats Drew on classical mythology for their work myths Lin themselves to being retold and this flood of new Greek myths Hing the shelves is certainly nothing

new one aspect of this recent boom of Greek myth retellings which sets them apart from previous iterations is the focus on reentering women or otherwise marginalized voices many of these novels are marketed as feminist retellings over the years of reading retellings like these I've noticed and have often agreed with reviewers who point out that simply focusing on women in Greek mythology doesn't necessarily equate to giving them agency that's the irony inherent in retelling a Greek myth though women are the narrators they're still constrained by the trappings of their original stories or as one good Goodreads

reviewer puts it just because a novel is written about a woman doesn't automatically make it feminist y all I want to examine this issue by analyzing a few of the most popular and widely known retellings I'm not interested in bashing these novels but it I think it's a great opportunity as a sub genre becomes more and more profitable to consider whether retelling famous stories from women's perspectives is really changing anything about how we understand these myths and also where these female characters were ever really silent in the first place later on I'll also discuss Laur

Olympus and how Greek mythology is used as a marketing tool on Tik Tok especially in the romance genre and finally I do want to talk about what responsibility and what right we have in retelling myths from a culture we don't necessarily belong [Music] to Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster who been a good chunk of her career bringing the classical world to a modern audience she had a BBC Radio 4 show called Natalie Hayne stands up for the classics in which she discussed figures from Antiquity but if you've heard her name you probably know

her from this book 2019s a thousand ships or from 2017's Children of Jaster or 2022 Stone blind a thousand ships is the one that seems to have really caught on it was shortlisted for the 2020 women's prize for fiction and for the purposes of of this video it's the one that interests me the most a thousand ships retells the major events of the Trojan War from the perspective of its female characters the Trojan War was a Mythic battle fought between the aans the people who would later become the ancient Greeks and the Trojans the war

is sparked because of a woman Paris a prince of Troy abducts the wife of the Spartan King Minos an act which triggers the aans to unite in war against Troy there are many other women who feature in the Trojan war myths some of them are the wives of the Trojan and Greek soldiers like adicus wife Penelope or Hector's wife andromachi others are local women taken captive by Greek soldiers or women who live in the besieged city of Troy much of the marketing surrounding this book emphasizes the idea that these women's stories are otherwise Untold the

book is described as centering the pain of women who have always been Rel ated to the edges of the story victims of men survivors of men slaves of men women who have waited long enough for their turn in an interview Hayne said I knew I wanted to tell the women's stories because they have been almost entirely overlooked the characters are right there in the shadows waiting to be found it was irresistible the issue I take with haynes's framing of her book is that put simply these women's stories are not Untold they are told numerous times

in some of the most famous ancient texts that survive haynes's book shifts between several different women's perspectives and in just looking at the chapter names I can start draing quick parallels penelopy figures large in The Odyssey epia appears in two plays by Ides kopy is depicted in ID's metamorphosis kistra is a strong and memorable character in Ides ignia at Alas and many more of course to be fair to Haynes I don't think she's saying these women's stories aren't told at all but that they aren't told well so let's put this Theory to the test in

The Odyssey Penelope is the wife of king edicius during ads' 20-year absence as he fights in Troy and tries to get home again many suitors show up to his Palace in an attempt to woo Penelope Penelope doesn't want to remarry but in the spirit of being a good host she can't turn them away and so must watch as her husband's fortune and her son's inheritance is quite literally eaten Away by their disrespectful guests in a thousand ships Penelope's perspective is told through letters which she sends to her husband uus the first letter is sent at

the end of the Trojan War as she looks forward to his return but as the letters continue Penelope is increasingly frustrated at his long absence the letters retell the story of The Odyssey with Penelope's commentary as she hears the news of her husband's escapades it's a device which doesn't totally make sense for one how do these BS singing to pelop know about ad deus's adventures and such detail and how was she planning on getting these letters to aysus it seems to be that hannes is drawing on Margaret Atwoods the Penelope ad which has a similar

situation of BS telling Penelope what's happening to adus but in neither book does it make total sense it's worth asking exactly what hannes is fixing here what new side of Penelope are we seeing that isn't present in the Odyssey the Penelope of the Odyssey is a passive character defined by in action she refuses to make a choice as to which sutor she'll marry and she's hopeful adius will return one day she promises her sutors she'll marry once she has finished weaving her father-in-law's funeral shroud but every day she unwe it quite literally nullifying her own

actions she is intentionally consistently passive but to assume this makes her weak or poorly written is a disservice to her character Penelope is clever while adicus is out on his travels telling riddles to the Cyclops and using his clever words to win favor Penelope is doing the same thing at home using guile and trickery like unweaving the Shroud to buy herself time this is thematically important Penelope is a mirror of adicus they're cut from the same cloth there's a scene when aysus arrives home in Disguise and Penelope famously tests him to make sure he's her

husband checking to see if he remembers how their marriage bid is built their reunion feels a bit like that scene where Varys and Littlefinger are having the battle of the wits and Game of Thrones Penelope and adicus are the same character type shoved around by Powers beyond their control forced to be reactive rather than proactive and gaining power through meus or cess There's an opportunity to do something really interesting with this parallel but Natalie Haynes doesn't do that one thing that repeatedly frustrated me about Penelope's chapters was how little of Penelope we see effectively Penelope's

chapters are an opportunity to retell the odsy from a women's perspective but in doing so we lose out on Penelope's own life effectively she just becomes the narrator of her husband's Feats with a bit of nagging throwing in we get that classic jealous Trope when she gets mad when she finds out aysia spent seven years with the nymph Calypso in The Odyssey Penelope gets a lot of time on the page and a good portion of the Epic is dedicated to life at home as she and her son telemus attempt to navigate life with the suitors

in contrast the Penelope of a thousand ships isn't really a character on the blur of the book Haynes claims to be pushing the women girls and goddesses at the center of the story but if anything this version of Penelope only exists in service of her husband's story in The Iliad Helen is pretty unambiguously the cause of the Trojan War she's also one of the few famous women who doesn't get her own perspective in a thousand ships but only appears peripherally in other women's perspective hannes doesn't make her a particularly human or empathetic character in chapter

16 when she first appears she's described as swanlike and also inhuman and is said to be despised by all other women in Troy she makes a lukewarm defense of her actions and argues that as a woman she faces a double standard which her husband Paris doesn't face I'm going to talk a bit later on about my frustrations with ancient characters being made to argue talking points like these but we'll put that aside for now I want to compare Helen's betrayal here to how she's depicted in The Iliad which is probably her most famous portrayal in

all of literature The Iliad is a poem sit during the final year of the Trojan War it's about death and grief and heroism it's frankly not the sort of poem we would expect to have any female characters at all let alone one to give Helen a voice in fact I imagine many people who haven't read the ilad would assume Helen is is the villain of the poem but Helen not only speaks she's a remarkably complex character we first meet her as she rushes up to the walls of Troy to watch a duel take place between

her husband Paris and her former husband Mina there she meets King pre ruler of Troy who treats her with kindness Helen doesn't deflect blame she tells pre How Deeply upset and ashamed she is about being the cause of the war saying I wish I had chosen painful death the day I came here pre Comforts Howen and treats her like a daughter and they share a poignant scene as they sits side by side observing the battle far below talking to each other there's a moving moment as Helen tries to find her two brothers in the crowd

of aan Fighters not realizing they're already dead it's devastatingly sad both characters are royal both are helpless both are doomed to ignorance Homer doesn't introduce Helen to insult her she's there for the posos later Helen stands up to Paris and even attempts to argue with Aphrodite for involving her in the shameful War at the end of the Epic when Hector's body is brought back to Troy she gives an incredibly moving lament for him saying that he was one of the only people who was ever kind to her I can't help noticing how the Helen of

The Iliad feels so much more sympathetic and complex than the Helen of a thousand ships partly in the fact that she clearly feels bad about the war I mean sure it's not entirely her fault many men are far more to blame than sheers but Howen and a thousand ships is so quick to write off the blame of the war to other men around her that she feels flat aloof lacking complexity much harder to empathize with than the very human Helen of The Iliad it feels like a missed opportunity not to give Helen her own perspective

especially in a book that claims to be restoring the Lost voices of women hannes is bringing a new generation to the myths of Troy and in doing so she's also framing how new readers will understand the original Source material the marketing and framing of a thousand ships would lead the unfamiliar reader to believe that the Iliad and odyssey don't portray female perspectives I'm by no means saying that the female representation in these poems is excellent but it is interesting The Odyssey is effectively a tale of one man being shunted between powerful women Athena kir kapi

even now her voice and agency some of the iliad's most emotional moments come from speeches given by female characters like the funeral liament given in book 24 by Helen Hiba and andromachi another frustration I'd add is that largely the women of a thousand ships still have their lives and concerns centered around men anas's wife crusa spends a whole chapter wandering around and such of her husband Penelope only talks about adicus that's the irony inherent in a feminist retelling the point of view characters might be women now but the myths are still about men Natalie Haynes

is very knowledgeable about the classics and it's a well-written book the pros is lovely I just find it frustrating that her book is for many readers the closest they'll ever get to actually reading The Iliad or Odyssey and it might lead them to believe that Homer's epics are war poems exclusively about men retellings are hard and corrective retellings doubly so how do you foreground new voices and present old stories in a fresh Light while remaining faithful to myths as widely known as the Greek Canon I think mateline Miller's the song of Achilles highlights some of

these issues for the record I like the song of Achilles I think the reason I like it is because it's in really interesting dialogue with its Mythic sources Miller credits her inspiration for the novel with her frustrations over how some scholarship dismissed the relationship between Achilles and patrickus labeling them as good friends despite it being abundantly clear and sources like Plato Symposium that the classical Society viewed them as lovers this topic would become her master's thesis I think that's what makes the song of Achilles such an effective book meline Miller is using Mythic retelling to

make a compelling original argument that said Miller has chosen difficult protagonists her patrickus is sensitive thoughtful and unusually kind her Achilles is brilliant gifted and also unusually kind the Achilles of The Iliad is a vicious and cruel fighter he's not particularly similar to the Achilles Miller conjured how does she adapt the SI about the Trojan War while keeping faithful to the myth and achilles characterization well she makes some changes in The Iliad patrias is a trained Warrior but if m to keep this it would cause some problems for one patrickus would bear witness to the

Daily brutalities Achilles inflicts as he sacks surrounding towns and cities slaughtering and enslaving and so Miller patrickus is instead A Healer keeping him both a more likable character and meaning that the immorality of what Achilles is doing Isn't So confronting but the problem isn't entirely solved as the Warriors raid and pillage surrounding Villages they bring home captive women as War prizes and concubines Achilles himself captures brus how to square this with Miller's Kinder more sensitive Achilles well Achilles brings bras with him as a matter of protection for her and she gradually befriends patrickus I think

bras character is a bit flat which feels like a shame especially as it in service of keeping Achilles lickable but this is not to say I think the song of IES is bad frankly I think it would have been a much worse book had Miller kept Faithfully to The Iliad the Achilles of The Iliad is a hard character to sympathize with and he doesn't serve the purpose of the story Miller is trying to tell the reason I'm highlighting this discrepancy in Miller's novel is that I think it's an important example of how retellings cannot be

entirely faithful to their Source material these authors must make necessary changes in creating adaptations for a current audience the beauty of Greek myth is that they are flexible and varied enough to mold to contemporary tastes and speak to different times perhaps the best storytelling merge when authors don't feel constrained to merely retri well-known myths but allow themselves the flexibility of amending reimagining and reshaping mythology to meet new ends in the introduction to her translation of The Iliad Emily Wilson talks about the challenge of balancing readability for a modern audience while avoiding anachronisms one choice she

makes is to call the aans Greeks most translators choose not to do so the melee of different city states who joined the fry and the Trojan War weren't linked under any sort of broad national identity and aan is usually considered more accurate as it applies to the geographical location but as Wilson says she considers Clarity and readability as more important than this small anachronism much like a translator an author of a retelling must decide what changes are necessary to help a modern audience appreciate aspects of the original Source even if the changes make the work

less accurate but in saying that it's perhaps worth arguing this point from the other direction what responsibility does an author have to Faithfully represent original sources to a readership who may only read the retelling readers of meline Miller are going to have a very different understanding of the character of Achilles than readers of The Iliad what happens when Mythic retellings are so FOC focused on speaking to a modern audience that they lose all sense of being set in the ancient past the Silence of the girls was published in 2018 and retells sections of the Iliad

from the perspective of brus a woman who was captured and enslaved by the Greek Soldier Achilles barus prus gives us an unsparing unflinching look inside the horror enslaved women experienced in the Greek Camp forced to become war prises of men who killed their families and sacked their homes in particular Barker's novel seeks to restore the Lost unrecorded voices of these women whose perspectives aren't considered important enough to appear in epic poetry just on a level of Pros it's a powerful read I thought suppose suppose just once once all these centuries the slippery Gods keep their

word and achilles has granted eternal glory in return for his early death under the walls of Troy what will they make of us the people of Those unimaginably Distant times one thing I do know they won't want the brutal reality of conquest and slavery they won't want to be told about the massacres of men and boys the enslavement of women and girls they won't want to know we were living in a rape Camp no they'll go for something altogether softer a love story perhaps I just hope they managed to work out who the lovers were

this quote from the character prus highlight something that sat a bit uncomfortably with me after I finished reading It's very effective sure but it also doesn't sound like something a woman of the time would have said it sounds like the voice of the author talking to us musing about her own craft I kept noticing this while reading braas never quite felt like a character to me but more like a voer making these very arod observations every time she faces fresh Injustice because make no mistake this was his story his anger his grief I was angry

I was grieving but somehow that didn't matter here I was still trapped still stuck inside his story and yet with no real part to play silence becomes a woman every woman I've ever known was brought up on that saying there's the sense I think that you can fix a female character in retellings by making her pushy or retaliatory we see this cycle happen in Disney princesses who are very aware they're Disney Princesses and yet continue to fit the mold of a Disney princess while making ironic observations about it I do want to fairly represent Pat

bar here because she is doing something interesting the memory of a society and how that Society will remember you is one of if not the major theme of The Iliad and Barky uses bra's voice to turn the poems FAS ation with memory onto the characters it forgets above all a homic warrior hopes to be remembered the warriors on the battlefield must fight gloriously and magnificently or they run the risk of being forgotten it's a tragic Paradox in dying to win the respect of their Community they put that community at greater risk no longer alive to

protect their families memory and reputation are woven into every aspect of the Iliad and so it makes sense that Pat bark has chosen to invert this idea using the language of grief and pain which the ilad is so versed in when relating to male violence and turning it unflinchingly onto the unrecorded shadowy and forgotten women of the Epic we're going to survive our songs our stories they'll never be able to forget us decades after the last man who fought at Troy is dead their sons will remember the songs their Trojan mothers sang to them will

be in their dreams and in their worst nightmares too and yet when I read lines like these I'm reminded of how much more subtly The Iliad achieves the same effect the characters of The Iliad very rarely actually talk to each other about memory it's a theme that goes unsaid underpinning almost every action and conversation there's something that feels very on the nose about br's constant lecture on the importance of telling their own stories it's powerful sure but it lacks subtlety and the overall effect is that Pras doesn't feel like a woman from the ancient world

she feels more like a 21st century hero and dropped in an ancient world well versed in the suffrage movement and frustrated by the world she's forced to live in the real women who were alive at the time of whatever Trojan War The Iliad is based on weren't clinical sensible voyers with the power to look through the idiocy and pitfalls of their own time it puts me in mind of a quote by the excellent historical fiction writer Dame Hillary Manel the pursuit of the past makes you aware whether you are a novelist or a historian of

the dangers of your own fallibility and inbuilt bias the writer of history is a walking he must try to work authentically hearing the words of the past but communicating in a language that the present understands I think an interesting comparison to Pat Parker is Mary reenal born in 1905 renalt is one of the best known writers of historical fiction set during Antiquity specifically queer historical fiction her books present Same seex Love as something deeply interwoven into Greek society which is both factually accurate and also something most historians and novelists of her time glossed over the

fact that ral's characters speak astutely in the voice of their time and don't conform to contemporary sensibilities of the 1950s and 60s is what gives her books their power this isn't to say her books weren't engaged with their times the last of the wine her first Greek historical novel is set in a crumbling Athens as democracy is replaced with tyranny and a parallel can be drawn between Athens and apartheid South Africa where renal was was living at the time the novelist Hillary mantel who I'm bringing up again because I love her so much said of

reenal she does not pretend the past is like the present or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us she shows us this strangeness Discerning shooted challenging our values piking our curiosity she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us I couldn't agree more with this reading ral's books feels alienating jarringly out of step with the world of today renal dismissed any idea that people of the past are like those in the present declaring that to pretend so is an evasion and a betrayal turning our backs on them so as

to be easy among familiar things while bras in the Silence of the girls feels like she' happily assimilate to the 21st century reena's characters are almost entirely unrelatable and it creates a wonderfully strange reading experience this is not to say that Rena's method of writing historical fiction is the correct method in fact a lot of this is just my own personal taste speaking but I'm curious about examining the pitfalls that arise when historic characters are written anachronistically it doesn't simply break our immersion in the world but it runs the risk of turning characters into walking

mouthpieces parting particular messages I found the Silence of the girls very affecting but I never is entirely convincing as a character it doesn't escape my notice that many recent Greek mythology retellings heading the shelves in the past 5 years tend to be written by women and written about women there's a real interest in recovering and retelling the stories of female characters a lot of these books tend to be corrective it's worth noting that almost all of them Market themselves as retellings or reimaginings rather than historical fiction women's history is not there on the surface it

needs to be dug for prized free from The Source material dusted off and written transformatively it is frustrating that female authors can't write about ancient history in an uncomplicated way but must always be speculating reimagining or critically analyzing this Source material either that or go down the Mary Renault route and largely exclude female characters and yet I just don't think the mythology requires the level of reimagining and retelling that some of these authors are giving it though Greek society was intensely patriarchal the myths they told and retold centered strong female characters time and again it's

one of the great dichotomies that lies at the heart of helenic History if women in ancient Greece were such a marginalized class of people why did powerful women figure so large in myth why is a character like Meda who kills her children to get revenge on her husband allowed to escape with a happy ending at the end of the play why is Eugenia a girl who was killed by her own father aamon to appease a goddess given the lead role in a play by Ides in which she gives an impassioned speech about her desire to

die for Glory Like a homeric Warrior the real living women learning about these myths L lives of silence and servitude there's a popular helenic saying that goes it is a woman's Glory not to be spoken of either for praise or blame the only time a good beautiful woman was to be seen in public was on her tombstone when she was dead in the flood of Greek mythology retellings many authors claim to be restoring the lost voice of ancient women and I don't say this to be a pedant but the women who are truly silenced are

the ones that we don't hear about they're this woman or this one woman whose only record of ever having lived are their gravestones I feel there's this pressure on female authors to frame their stories as doing important work in recovering lost voices even if they're not really doing that which is kind of meant that stories like Laur Olympus which are very much not correcting their original myths get lumped in with stories perceived as feminist retellings more on that later I don't think any of the books I've discussed so are bad generally I feel like these

books well researched they have good arguments they're educational about the myths they're retelling and in the huge sweep of Greek historical novels and retellings these are among the bitter ones I've really made the point I want to make here but if you fancy sticking around I think at time we talked about some of the works which are not strictly retellings but which draw more Loosely on Greek myths these are a broader class of works and I wouldn't say they're such a distinctive pattern for what they get wrong so are single out a few to discuss

which face unique [Music] complications law Olympus is a webtune first published back in 2018 and I really wanted this video to focus specifically on recent novels however in terms of the main streif of Greek myths law Olympus cannot be ignored as of recording it has 1.3 billion views and 6.5 million subscribers so it's safe to say this is one of the top Works introducing new readers to Greek mythology I want to discuss it in relation to this idea of what I'll call one itti removed myths that is stories that use the names and sometimes likenesses

of characters of Greek and Roman mythology and tell stories that diverge from the original myth they often called retellings Laura Olympus is marketed as a Hades and pcif retelling but not actually familiarizing people with the material of the myth like the song of Achilles they usually diverge significantly from their Source material and they rely on the reader to have some basic background knowledge in order to notice all the Mythic parallels so let's talk about the myth of Hades and pany pacian is a nymph who is abducted by the ruler of the underworld Hades after deita's

efforts to rescue her daughter panie spends half the year in the Underworld with Hades and half the year in the land of the living with her mother later myths emphasized Pan's power and fearsomeness as Queen of the underworld it's not my favorite myth but other people love it in ancient times Hades wasn't a popular God as ruler of the underworld he didn't really have anything to offer people and he wasn't widely woried by comparison pany was very popular there was an ancient site called el usus where a mystery cult woried piphany and her mother deer

it's called a mystery cult because effectively we have no idea how the cult worked or what they did I actually tried visiting the ancient site but sadly it was closed so I had to stare longingly through the fence I guess Al usus will remain a mystery to me Rachel smi's retelling follows pipany who is a student at a university in Olympus and Hades a wealthy business tycoon who manages the underworld there are some controversies I won't be getting into surrounding this web tune many readers take issue with the age Gap at the start of the

story piphany is 19 while Hades is over 2,000 years old instead I'm interested in talking about the ways in which the whb tune breaks away from its Mythic source and the consequences the most famous account we have of the Abduction of piphany comes from the homic him to demer this was not actually composed by Homer probably a series of poems describing the origins of certain gods are often attributed to Homer because of this style and and meter there are other retellings of Pan's abduction but this is the big one the homeric him to toer briefly

plays out the Abduction of pany but mostly focuses on the suffering of Pan's mother deita as she attempts to cope with the grief of losing her daughter after Pan's abduction deita learns that Zeus has helped orchestrate the kidnapping Furious she seeks comfort in the mortal world and later withholds the Harvest humans have no food to offer the gods and both Heaven and Earth go hungry finally Zeus relents and pacian is reunited with her mother though with a caveat that she must return to Hades for part of each year the hymn is shock horor about deer

Hades is not really a player in the him he's a plot device nothing more the story is about how the natural order is broken by pany being dragged to the underworld and deita withholding the Harvest and how deita restores that order remember I mentioned the inian Mysteries deita establishes the Mysteries as a gift for Humanity and she and pacian are the key players The Divide between life and death has been shattered pany has a foot in both worlds and she and her mother can impart secrets about the afterlife to initiates of the eleusinian Mysteries yes

the heric him to Demeter is basically an advert for getting initiated into this hot new cult this is a story about a bond between a mother and a daughter and the power of a mother's anger to literally move heav Heaven and Earth to get her child back it's about love overcoming death and two powerful goddesses imparting their wisdom to humans to comfort them about death this is why I tend to dislike Hades and pany retellings because they often seem to miss the point this isn't about Hades this is about a girl who was loved so

much that the boundaries of life and death were shattered to get her back we've already discussed how modern adaptations must make some changes to suit their new audience my issue isn't especially with the Betrayal of piphany and Hades but rather with demer in the webtune she is betrayed as a helicopter parent one who is too involved in her daughter's life and intentionally shelters her at the start of the comic we see demita trying to coers pany into joining the goddesses of Eternal maidenhood a program that will effectively strip her of her sexuality given the much

of the comic revolves around pfan learning to embrace her sexuality this quickly sets up Dema as the antagonist a controlling Force pany must break free of in order for the plot to progress she does go on to do actively cruel and hurtful things to her daughter in episode 230 de stages a public intervention with the goddesses of Eternal maidenhood to publicly shame pacian into joining her characterization as an overbearing parent not only I think does a des service to the original myth but also inadvertently causes some of the other issues people take with Laur Olympus

the fact that Dita is so controlling means that pany is extremely naive particularly in relation to sexuality she's Often ogled by male gods and has explicit remarks made about her body but often seems to ignore or misunderstand these comments continuing to appear in her underwear in front of male visitors and misunderstanding the suggestive remarks made about her her naivity and innocence makes the age gap between her and Wealthy business tycoon Hades particularly icky it makes me wonder how how the story could have looked if deita's concerns about Pan's relationship were taken seriously at the moment

it feels like deita and her sheltered style of parenting inadvertently take the blame for Pan's innocence and not the men who are taking advantage of that innocence there's room for debate about how much agency pacian actually has in the comic which I went we're getting into to be sure she doesn't have much agency in the original but I do think it's a shame to trade one woman's empowerment for another I think the story of Laur Olympus would have been stronger if it kept more closely to the demer of the homic hymn and explored themes of

mother daughter love the power of female bonds and the lengths a mother will go to to keep her daughter safe as it is pany feels pretty friendless and isolated in Laur Olympus entirely dependent on hades's love and kindness for her safety and career there isn't much media nowadays that explores strong healthy mother daughter relationships and Laura Olympus feels to me like a missed opportunity another recent example that comes to mind is crown of staring light yes this is the book whose author was onear bombing her fellow debut authors Goodreads to make her own reviews look

better her book was pulled and was never officially released so I'll base my commentary here on a review from reads with Rachel who reviewed an arc crown of Starlight Loosely retells the story of ariadne who in the original myth is the daughter of King minus the guy with the Labyrinth and the minitor this video is very long so I won't do a full rundown kin's retelling is sit in space and follow ariadne as she helps Theus escape and is later betrayed and rescued by dianis I have not read crown of Starlite in fact almost no

one has but I bring it up here as it seems to have similar issues to Neon Gods based on Rachel's review it seems that the mythological aspects are very clumsily Incorporated and really muck up the pacing of course I can't judge for myself but from what I gather it seems like another situation where a reimagining of a myth is so removed and vague that the use of mythological character names exists basically only for marketability and not because it's adding anything substantive to the narrative it is possible to write a books sit in the modern day

which incorporates aspects of Greek mythology to great effect Percy Jackson comes to mind a books whose characters law and mythological relevance is integral to the story other authors refer to Greek mythology to enrich their work on an intertextual LEL Carol and Duffy's poem Medusa takes the concept of the gorgon and uses it to explore the destructive power of jealousy and rage in a feminist context singers like hosia and safan Stevens frequently draw Mythic parallels in their songs quick shorthand to communicate large ideas these singers writers and Poets use myth as an effortless cultural lexicon a

framework that allows them to examine age-old human ideas the major difference I'd say with a lot of these retellings is that Greek mythology becomes difficult and constraining a challenge you can actively feel the author figuring out how to manage rather than something spontaneous and innovative at its best classical Illusions exist to help the writer go beyond them a great Creator will use an audience's assumed knowledge of the myth of Hades and piphany to play on our expectations and take us somewhere unexpected every good Mythic retelling should bring something new and interesting to its original My

worry is in this flood of new Mythic retellings is that they add nothing substantive but rely on name recognition alone and this has higher Stakes than just being irritating for classic nerd like [Music] me Greek mythology has become such a ubiquitous term for us that it's easy to forget that like all other mythologies Greek myth belongs to a particular landscape and a particular people and its widespread influence over the centuries is thanks in large part to colonization author Katarina Cosgrove is a Greek Australian writer and she recently wrote an article that poses a challenge to

the mythology retellings who owns these stories she argues if writers are not Greek not part of Greece's distinct land sea light and air I wonder how they understand The Mortals gods and goddesses they are writing about I question how they engage with the original sources and whether they sometimes misinterpret them without experience of Greek history and without Greek ancestors I wonder if it's easier to inadvertently trivialize simplify and dumb down the philosophies rituals and mindsets of these ancient cultures homogenizing creating cliches and tired tropes the Greek gods are not benign disembodied cartoon characters they are

powerfully symbolic not simplistic all inspiring frightening unpredictable is this use of a particular culture mythology is acceptable when Greeks are still reeling from the effects of the Civil War the generals J and the economic crisis wind does the unknown and unknowable state of being inspired by these myths become cultural appropriation she makes a very powerful argument especially if we consider Greece's history of colonization firstly by the Romans in the first century BC then later the Ottomans the venetians the British and the Germans but Greece perhaps more than any other country has a history of cultural

colonization with other countries claiming domain over its cultural heritage Lord Elgen a Scottish nobleman and British ambassador to the Ottoman Empire famously acquired large amounts of treasures from Greece's pathon between 1801 and 1812 it's generally recognized he went far beyond his allotted mandate taking pediment sculptures freeze slabs and metopes many of these Treasures were loadbearing and architecturally important to the temples they were taken from there has since been a prolonged campaign from the Greek government to acquire the marbles back which the British museum has refused to do to this day Elgen is very much a

product of British helenismo at Oxbridge were taught Greek and were given a full classical education which quickly became a symbol of high culture and good breeding even history wasn't safe John Stewart Mill once claimed that the battle of Marathon was an event in British history given that the true ancestors of the European nations are not those from whose blood they are sprung but from whom they derive the richest portion of their inheritance Greece was plundered for its historic and Architectural wealth its ancient language became a symbol of elitism or while the real Greece was under

ottoman occupation in the Victorian period many wealthy Travelers visited Greece and took home column drums or statues to decorate their Gardens with many visitors carve their names onto temples Lord Byron was famously one of the first there's something in this that speaks uncomfortably to the modern day as a wealth of mythological retellings almost entirely written by non Greek authors carve themselves aresh into Greek history as Katarina Cosgrove says if these writers co-opt Greek oral histories handed down from mouth to mouth and generation to generation I don't see them leaving any room for minority Greek writers

within Greece and in the diaspora to tell their own stories and to have any hope of getting them published and garnering attention my Greek publisher the oldest house in the country is struggling to stay afloat in the new Greece Greek writers can't get published Greece has suffered from many waves of colonization and this feels like the latest many writers of Greek mythological retellings are classicists themselves and have deep love for their subject matter lots of them grew up loving Greek mythology but even so do they have a right to the myths they retelling the Greek

gods aren't superheroes as Cosgrove points out many of them are still woried in parts of the world today some authors have made a lot of money of the marketability of Greek mythology many have won big prizes very few of them are Greek [Music] if you've read The Iliad you may have noticed the mention in book 10 of a Bor Tusk helmet worn by edsus in Alexander Pope's translation it reads his temples crowned soft wool within without in order spread A's white teeth grinned horid over his head Pope began his translation in 1713 and at the

time he translated this passage he and his contemporaries would never have seen a Bor Tusk helmet for all anyone knew it was a poetic invention it wasn't until later excavations at Bronze Age sites such as M ey and dos that several borus helmets were uncovered these were beautiful pieces of craftsmanship the small tusks were interlined with metal and it's estimated that around 40 to 50 BS would have to be killed just to make one these were expensive helmets a big fancy status symbol that you'd be buried in and on honestly not very practical but what's

really fascinating is that with the collapse of the Bronze Age these helmets weren't made anymore almost none are found in later archaeological contexts after the Bronze Age the writing systems of the Myans were lost poetry was passed orally from generation to generation a cacophony of voices telling and retelling the story shaping The Iliad into what it is today it wasn't until the mid 8th Century BC that the Greeks borrowed the Phoenician alphabet and The Iliad was finally written down and by this time no one alive would ever have seen a helmet like this they'd been

lost to history for around 700 years see The Iliad is not just a myth it's history history wrapped up in myth and poetry and passed down through generations when poetry and oral storytelling were the only means of recordkeeping myth is history myth is culture it's a living breathing activ way of keeping history alive in an article examining the purpose of retelling myths Jennifer Saint a popular author of mythological retelling says when we read myths today we are another Link in a chain of Storytelling that spans nearly 3,000 years it feels significant to be part of

something so quietly momentous and to that I say yes it is momentous in retelling Greek mythology these authors are being tasked with bringing Folk cultur history to a new generation who may never have read Homer or Herodotus or thides their only encounter with Greek culture and mythology will be authors like Jennifer Saint Rachel SMI meline Miller authors in whose hand it falls to tell these myths to a new readership we are shaping how these myths will be encountered and remembered how lives and histories are being told and language like a feminist twist or giving X

character a voice only impose ourselves upon that past in an un imaginative incurious manner the people who believed in these gods were once alive they deserved to have their lives and their beliefs retold respectfully these novelists poets and writers who were inspired by the ancient world and whose work I adore use myths as a rope to pull the ancient world across the boundless Gulf of time letting our current world brush against an unfathomably ancient one historical fiction has the power to restore life to the dead at this point I feel I have nothing to say

that Hillary mantel hasn't already said better so I will leave you with her words historical fiction comes out of greed for experience violent curiosity drives us on takes us far from our time far from our shore and often beyond our Compass to retrieve history we need rigor Integrity unsparing devotion and an Impulse to skepticism to retrieve the past we need all those virtues and something more if we want added value to imagine not just how the past was but what it felt like from the inside we pick up a novel The historian and the biographer

follow a trail of evidence usually a paper trail the novelist does that too and then performs another act puts the past back into process into action frees the people from the archive and lets them run about ignorant of their Fates with all their mistakes unmade [Music]