Today’s post has been brought to you by Erika Meriaux, one of my favorite  artists, who has a really spectacular collection of paintings of Greek Myths (among other subjects). The first painting is of Nana*, the daughter of the River Sangarios, who became the mother of Attis. Here’s what Pausanias has to say about her:

“The gods, fearing Agdistis, cut off the male organ. There grew up from it an almond-tree with its fruit ripe, and a daughter of the river Sangarios, they say, took the fruit and laid it in her bosom, when it at once disappeared, but she was with child. A boy [Attis] was born, and exposed, but was tended by a he-goat.”

Obviously, there’s a lot going on there behind the scenes, but this is such an awesome story, and so full of awesome characters that I can’t help but share.

First of all, this is definitely a story about how sex - especially feminine sexuality - can be dangerous (to men). Keep that in mind as you learn who’s who.

So, the person whose “male organ” gets cut off? That’s Agdistis. I bet you’re now thinking that Agdistis was a man. In fact, Agdistis was a hermaphrodite, or to use a less loaded but more anachronistic term, intersex and also two-gendered. (Genderqueer people take note! There may be a little bit of room for reclamation here.) Anyway, Agdistis was conceived from the masturbation (or wet dreams) of Zeus, but once born, everybody started freaking out. They thought that having two genders meant that Agdistis was also doubly powerful, and so the penis severing was their violent attempt to neutralize what they perceived as a threat. What makes this even MORE awesome? Agdistis was Cybele, who is a totally rockin’ Phrygian goddess that often gets identified with Rhea, but also made it all the way to Greece (and Rome) to be worshiped in her own right.

Now you’d think that this would be the point at which I could talk about Nana, right? But no. After wandering by and accidentally getting knocked up with Agdistis’s almond-seed (heh), she disappears from view, and all attention gets put on Attis. Attis, by the way, is a gender neutral name in Greek, like Iphis, but this Attis was born a boy. However - and here’s where the stories are really different depending on who you’re reading - something screwed up happens. Either 1) Agdistis (Cybele) falls in love with him and shows up at the wedding whereupon Attis (and the father of the bride) castrate themselves and maybe die (there’s also a woman at the party who cuts off her breasts) OR 2) Attis grew up being totally devoted to Cybele which meant also staying a virgin, but then he eventually sleeps with a nymph named Sagaritis (which sounds suspiciously like Sangarios …), and the goddess kills the nymph and Attis castrates himself.

So there’s some incest in there, but MOSTLY this is seems to be a story about the dangers of a sexual fertility Goddess who is out of a more powerful male’s control. Which, given that she wasn’t considered monstrous, is pretty awesome. It’s worth mentioning too that even in later ancient Rome, there were priests to Cybele (called Galli) who castrated themselves when they entered her service, so this was obviously more than a powerful gender lesson.

Still interested? Read the whole story here. Also, I wrote a post about Transgender Myths to Know that you might also find interesting.

*The second painting is of Cybele, aptly set in the pine forest where Attis went insane and castrated himself, taking a break with her lions. Like much of Meriaux’s work, I think this so perfectly captures the danger and sex and violence hidden in the banality of every day life.

So last year Breakfast With Pandora cast the Aeneid with the help of commenters. This seemed like a good idea to me, especially now that Clash of the Titans came out, and the Percy Jackson movies cast the characters without even needing the myths to go along with them.

So I was thinking about it. Who are your favorite characters? What are your favorite stories? What actors do you think could do them justice?

Now I don’t think I could possibly say FAVORITES, but one mythical chick I’d love to see on screen is

Antigone

Based off of the Sophocles plays, she’s one tough cookie of a princess, daughter of an (unintentionally) incestuous and doomed marriage between her dad/brother Oedipus and her mom/grandma Iocasta, sister to thepathetic Ismene and two overly aggressive brothers, and fiance to her cousin Haemon whose daddy eventually (SPOILER ALERT) sticks her in a cave to starve to death (she decides not to wait for that and goes with suicide instead).
Favorite line?

Herald:I forbid you to act thus in violation of the city.
Antigone: I forbid you to make useless proclamations to me.

Yeah, The Seven Against Thebes was pretty rockin’. Anyway, so Antigone? I’m going with Gina Torres. I think she’s got the guts and the gravitas to make Antigone as awesome as she should be.

So let’s take a moment to consider the other players in her life.Who could play Ismene, for example?I mean, she starts out like a wet blanket, and you kinda love to hate the girl, but she’s not a total wash, and you need an actress who can bring out the nuances of wanting to be a good woman and being stuck with that meaning you’re kind of a wash as a human being. I’ve seen Cate Blanchett do that well, but this really calls for a younger woman, I think. Maybe Audrey Tatou?

That leaves us with a few people, depending on which part of the story we want to tell. Who would make a good Haemon? Who’d make the villain Creon (her uncle, Haemon’s daddy)?  What about Oedipus and Iocasta? How about her brothers (I think Dante Basco should be one of them, tho)?

What do y’all think?

It was Mark Alford who first made me really bother looking a second time at Rick Riordan’s uber-popular Greek myth inspired Percy Jackson series. After I read it and started getting inundated with emails from kids hoping they were really demigods, I realized that it appeared to a lot of people that Riordan was doing something unusual. But honestly, there are lots of people who take Greek myths as their jump off for YA novels. Here’s a few:

• Nobody’s Princess by Esther M. Friesner (about Helen of Troy)
• Quiver by Stephanie Spinner (about Atalanta)
• Medusa Jones by Ross Collins (about, duh, Medusa)
• The Courtesan’s Daughter by Priscilla Galloway (about the infamous ancient Greek courtesan Neaira, more historical than mythic, but close enough)
• The Queen’s Thief series by Megan Whalen Turner starting with The Thief (the world is based off of Ancient Greece and the myths are loosely inspired by Ancient Greek myths)
• The Young Heroes series (they are stand-alone books) by Jane Yolen:
  • Hippolyta and the Curse of the Amazons (about Hippolyta)
  • Odysseus in the Serpent Maze (about Odysseus)
  • Atalanta and the Arcadian Beast (about Atalanta)
  • Jason and the Gorgon’s Blood (about Jason)

Then there’s the one’s that are aimed at grown-ups, like:

• The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood (which I reviewed here)
• Lavinia by Ursula K. LeGuin
• Till We Have Faces by C. S. Lewis (a retelling of the Psyche myth and one of my very favorite books ever)

My secret confession is that despite my love of YA books and my adoration of Greek mythology, I am rarely a fan of the novel adaptations. Mostly I think I’m just a grinch, which is why I hope that interested people will check out some of the ones I’ve listed above (I’m especially a fan of The Courtesan’s Daughter and The Thief), but there’s another reason too.

I really hate it when I get kids emailing me CONVINCED that Rick Riordan’s version of one god or another, or the structure of ancient Greek mythology generally is How It Worked. I don’t mind them getting the myths wrong or misunderstanding the various deities (much), because, honestly, who’s to say? But what I really hate is the idea that gets stuck in their little brains that there is One Correct Version. And the immediate follow up question is always, “is it real?” To which I am loathe to respond “no.” But when I DON’T respond “no” I get asked what the appropriate steps to BECOME a deity are. Or, alternatively, how they can get in contact with other children of Greek gods. Which kind of makes me cringe.

Grinch, I told you. But also because what is really out there is SO much richer! It is a real live other world that no one really sees or knows about anymore that they can actually access by reading the original poems. And they can!!! They TOTALLY can. The Homeric Hymns and certain translations of the Metamorphoses are fantastic for kids! I taught them to middle schoolers with no problems at all. People don’t give kids enough credit.

What do y’all think?

I honestly thought that the next entry I posted was going to say, “Sorry, I’m done with this blog. See you in a few years!” But then someone sent me an email asking me to fix my entry on Medusa to reflect that Medusa was raped by Poseidon and thus the punishment was deeply unjust.

I thought about it. The emailer was correct that the word Ovid uses to describe their sexual intercourse does not emphasize consent. But, in the end I decided not to for two reasons: 1) I’m pretty sure Ovid considered Medusa responsible for the sex, and that is not a description of rape I am comfortable with, and 2) having re-read Ovid’s version, I now think that Medusa is an awesome resister of the patriarchy!

There is a third possible reason as well, namely that earlier versions of the myth describe “laying together in a soft meadow among spring flowers” and even Ovid later describes this event as a “mingling of soft embraces.” This could easily outweigh the one word “vitiasse” (which I have arbitrarily decided to translated as “spoiled”). But the reality is, I don’t think we SHOULD write off “vitiasse.” In fact, quite the opposite! I think that Ovid is making the point that Poseidon “spoiled” Medusa for marriage. I mean, Ovid’s whole introduction to this is about what a hot potential wife Medusa was! This would have been considered illegal for both parties in ancient Rome, which helps explain why Ovid continues that Athena’s mutation of Medusa was a punishment of her “filthy crime.”

So, if you believe as Ovid appeared to that Medusa was complicit and responsible for this whole sexy-sex with Poseidon (which, for those who don’t remember the details of the story, took place in the temple of Athena), then Medusa is not the kind of victim that a current reading of the word “rape” might suggest. Instead, she becomes this totally awesome radical damn-the-man feminist! She says, “F* you, suitors, maybe I just want to have sex with a cute guy instead of sitting inside your women’s quarters for the rest of my life!” She says, “F* you, you daddy-loving, girl-power-hating Goddess! Maybe I don’t think you or any other representation of the system should get to decide where or with whom I get it on!” And, yeah, she totally suffers the consequence of breaking the rules, and, yeah, she is totally turned into this awful threat to women of “this is what happens to women who sleep with sexy men when they should be the property of their fathers,” but DAMN if she doesn’t go down fighting. Looking at it with a BIT of a revisionist eye, she lives out the rest of her life fighting against those “heroes” of patriarchal Greece. Even sitting on Athena’s shield should remind you of the dangerous power of a woman who decides to stop accepting the sexist rules and strikes out to do what she will!

Go Medusa!

I’ve been working up to writing this post for over a month, ever since Wendy responded to The Dangers of de-Mystification. I can’t address the whole thing in one post, so this will have to be a series. But by the end of this post, I hope to demonstrate a little better what the problems with appropriating myths might be.

What Wendy took issue with was not my dilemma, but the foundational concept underlying my dilemma: Are We Authentic? Her post is well written, and I suggest you read it, but there are two points that I want to respond to in particular: 1) that even if we’re not “authentic,” it’s okay to re-use other people’s stories

Are all of those mentioned above, and many more, examples of appropriation as the legends and myths travel with us to new places and times? Very possibly. But is it wrong, is it a sort of cheating? No. They all serve our very human need to explain ourselves, not just to ourselves, but to the universe, to our ancestors and descendants.¹

and 2) we very well may be more authentic than the source material we have available to us

I can’t agree that your ‘appropriation of Greek Goddesses isn’t authentic’. Oh yes, the records we have today come down to us mostly in male voices, from men who lived in a society that feared and hated women, but are we much different than that today? … I don’t believe the myths and characters from ancient Greece were born in a vacuum, but that they were revised, re-written and co-opted from earlier times, changed to appeal to the audience of the day. … So… a reinterpretation for today’s women and purpose is as authentic as the Greek myths were in their time.²

She is right, of course, that stories are constantly being reframed, and, indeed, that is how they continue to live and remain meaningful. And she is right that, “in reality, we cannot know what they thought,” and that our reframing may give voice to people we cannot hear in the textual sources. The problem comes, however, when you erase someone else’s voice to do that. And it’s really a problem, when that erasure reproduces oppression. And that’s exactly what is meant by appropriation; that’s why it’s not a neutral word. Read the rest of this entry »

I loved this book, but it’s taken me a year to figure out why. Sure, the writing was good - a more lit-y than the genre fic I usually read, something I had to chew and savor instead of swallowing down like cotton candy (which is NOT to say that genre is always cotton candy … but I LIKE cotton candy reading). The narrative itself swept me up and held me (although it took a little bit for me to get into it, I admit). I really liked the main character. I liked the way he talked about sex.  I thought it was enormously creative. Reading it made me feel light and alive.

And yet I would normally give something four stars that had all of those things. Five stars, saying, “I loved it,” needs something more. Something which is unique to my reading of it, instead of everyone else’s. A person reason. I just realized what it is.

I have read a bunch of fiction that plays with Greek Myths, from The Penelopiad and The King Must Die to The Lightning Thief and Roman Blood. I often enjoy these books, but I am almost always frustrated by them as well. The problem is that making Greek myths relevant and interesting often decontextualizes them so much that they lose what makes them truly meaningful and timeless. Of course, there are NEW ideas that have the potential for deep meaning as well, but I always grumble to myself, why did they have to erase the original meaning to do it?!

This book does not erase the original meaning of anything. It does not attempt, to explain the original meanings in their depth. Instead, it seems to simply celebrate that they WERE meaningful. But [author: Tom Robbins] doesn’t stop there. He examines history. How meaning (and identity) grows over time. How it lives. And in doing so he brings the ancient Greek characters to life again. Forever. Yay!

I recommend this book for Classicists who don’t like retellings of mythology; people interested in religion; anyone who likes good stories.

Hey guys, have you heard? There’s been a shift in Amazon Rank and stories like the ones you come to Women in Greek Myths to enjoy are in danger. That’s right, in the name of protecting kids from “adult” material, anything containing sexual, erotic, romantic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer content is getting censored from the sales Amazon Rank. Although I doubt they will actually start cutting D’Aulaires, books like Lovers’ Legends Unbound might be in real trouble (you can see my review of it here). Although I’m not pleased about the censorship generally, it is the unequal application (that LGBT - queer - books get slapped with the “adult” label when they’ve got nothing erotic about ‘em, but plenty of erotic hetero books continue on their merry, Amazon Ranked, way.

As some of you may remember from my post on Age-Appropriate Definitions in Greek Myths, I am hardly a radical on the question of how to talk about sexuality with kids, but (if people stopped forgetting that greek myths are full of this sort of thing) the book I dream of one day writing (discussed here) would probably be screwed, too.

ETA: Yeah, Lovers’ Legends Unbound got stripped of its Amazon Rank. Jerks.

I loved Greek myths when I was little. I loved that Athena trounced Ares on the regular and that she cared about the same kind of book-learning wisdom that I, and my privileged family, loved. I loved that Hera, for all that she was kind of annoying, did not just lay down and take it when Zeus cheated. I loved the wild youth of Artemis, and that she wasn’t sweet or kind but was truly fierce in a way Tyra Banks will NEVER understand. And I found ways to work their worship into my life, even as a self-identified Christian, when I spoke to the moon, or did my maidenhood ceremony with my mother.

But, just as the ancient Greeks worshipped their heroes, so did I. Antigone just about blew my mind (and even if I didn’t want to end up the way she did, you better believe I looked at the way she stood up to her uncle and cheered and wished my uncle were half so awful so that I be that cool). And the monsters? The Harpies can hardly fail to inspire your imagination, and in them it is easy to see the hunger, the snatching, selfish NEED that we all must carry somewhere inside us …

When I learned about them, really learned about them, I realized that they didn’t “really” mean to the ancient Greeks what they meant to me. That my use of them, my appropriation of them, wasn’t “authentic.” And as I started to learn more about ancient Greece - and, for example, the meaning of a motherless virgin like Athena who wants nothing to do with power for women - I began to have a great respect for what the world might have looked like for them.

The myths stopped being about me. And when they did, I stopped having a personal relationship with them. And when that happened, when the mystery about their place in the world was gone, I could not worship them any more. Not even in the little syncretic way I was attempting.

Maybe I should post a disclaimer on my site so that unsuspecting worshippers won’t stumble into relativism and out of their sacred cosmoses.

The truth is, even though there is SO much more to be said about the Greek goddesses, I’m just not spending much time thinking about them anymore. In fact, other than slowly reading Kirk Ormand’s book Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome, I’m really not thinking about the Classics at all these days.

I am, however, still thinking about stories, and myths, and religion, and women, and goddesses. Hopefully, that’s still interesting to the people who make their way to this website. I’ve been considering trying another start-up like the attempt I linked to in my post on Celtic Pretties, but this time doing it on some of the myths and goddesses of Mexico and Central America. There are tons of amazing goddesses to learn about - take the goddess Coyolxauqui, the moon, who tried to kill her brother Huitzilopochtli, and whose body was broken into pieces, or their mother Coatlicue (the Lady of the Serpent Skirt). I would love to learn more about them and share the awesomeness with you.

But I face a dilemma. I do NOT want to write about this in a way that goes: look! exotic! and encourages cultural appropriation. On the other hand, I do believe that these stories - while they should continue to “belong” to the indigenous peoples of Mexico and Central America - should be known and respected and retold and made relevant in new ways as continues to be done with Greek mythology. That said, I don’t necessarily think that I, as a white person with very little background in the topic at hand, should necessarily be the person making the call on how to go about doing that. While what I’ve done with (women in) Greek Myths hadn’t really been done when I got started, I’m not sure that it’s an appropriate approach to other mythologies.

I know people don’t come here for the book reviews, but IF you are interested in awesome children’s books like me, you should go get Lugalbanda: The Boy Who Got Caught Up in a War: An Epic Tale From Ancient Iraq. Although this is certainly something you could (slowly) read to your child, don’t be deceived, this is a serious retelling. It’s long. And just because the illustrations are outstanding, don’t think that this isn’t a book that any grown-up interested in mythology (particularly Greek, Babylonian, Sumerian, etc) should read. You should.

The description of the book is, “older than the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah, this stirring epic [is] the world’s oldest written story.” I can’t speak to that myself, not having looked farther than this book, but it is easy to believe. Apparently, it was written in cuneiform and wasn’t translated until the 1970’s!

And, even though this story is about a boy, it is also about Inana, the most important Goddess in the Sumerian pantheon and the Goddess of Love and War. (See, I’m making the ancient goddess connections!)

Highly recommend!

(As always, feel free to join me on Goodreads.com!)

So, for a while there, I was thinking about seeing if I was inspired to do something like Women in Greek Myths about Celtic junk. So I started the same I way I did when I was 13, compiling names and writing short descriptions. Slowly expanding my repertoire and leaving it open for anyone else interested to come along. I haven’t linked to it anywhere on my main site for two major reasons:

1) It doesn’t even come CLOSE to other sites on similar topics with regard to completeness, prettiness, citedness, or funniness

2) It was an experiment I wasn’t sure I would ever follow up on. Turns out, I pretty much abandoned it.

That said, if you are still reading this blog, I feel like the least I can do is throw this out there in case anyone is really curious. So here it is:

Women in Celtic Myth

and the beginnings of a Gallery of Celtic Women.

And if you go there and then wish there was some way to get back those wasted minutes? Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Well, I’m branching out a little today. Below I’ve linked to the hour and 20 minute movie “Sita Sings the Blues.” It’s the story of Sita (and Rama) as well as the contemporary story of the marriage of animator, Nina, all set to a collection of really amazing animation styles and Annette Hanshaw’s 1920 vocals.

From what I have previously read, this movie was pretty crippled by copyright stuff with the music and the lack of money available kept it from going big. So contribute if you like it!

http://www.thirteen.org/sites/reel13/blog/watch-sita-sings-the-blues-online/347/

ETA: And here’s a link to an awesome post called Sita Pays Her Dues by bossymarmalade. It critiques the film and the appropriation of Indian stuff.

As I mentioned in the last post, I am doing a bit of introspection about why I bother to write here (this blog and this site more generally).

The answer is that I wanted to know about women in Greek myths. Duh. But, really, that’s it. I mean, I wanted to know, not just their names, but why they were interesting.

I wanted to understand why some Goddesses, like Hemera, Gaia,  and Amphictyonis were relatively simple personifications of their names when others, like say, Persephone, have names, backgrounds, and myths so deeply ensconced in the past that we may never know what the deities represented.

I wanted to understand why the Greeks, so very long ago, had Great Goddesses like Demeter when we modern people, so much further along towards enlightenment (yes, I was a Hegelian youngster), didn’t even write spunky heroines that weren’t relying on men into movies!

And, perhaps most of all, I was hungry for stories of women that I could be proud to tell. Stories imbued with the rich respect of our mythical ancestors, but stories that I could make mine, that could make me stronger, that could root me.

I realize, now, that, although I still long for such things, I have given up on finding them in ancient Greek myth.

The first blow came when I fully appreciated that, in fact, things weren’t as feminist as they appeared. I learned that, while visibility is definitely a powerful thing, being visibly powerless isn’t nearly so exciting. I also discovered, somewhere along the way, to reject a progressive history and with that I lost the need to rely on the authority of our mythical ancestors in Classical civilization.

My interests changed, and I began to find more stories I could be proud of today (go see my Goodreads shelf to find some) and saw ancient Greek myths interesting primarily as a cross-culture comparison. And, for a few years there, I was allowed to read these myths in exquisite detail. But now that I do not, and now that I am surrounded by so many more cultures with rich mythologies to learn from, I am not sure what my new connection to this will be.

So I’m TAing a class this semester called “Many Ways of Being Human,” and on the first day of class I mentioned the blog Savage Minds as a place they might be interested in heading. But then I asked how many of them read blogs; for that matter, how many of them even checked news online; how many, I asked, use the internet for anything other than email (and porn, but I didn’t know them well enough to ask them that yet).

Like one person.

So, even though I care (really, I do) about the people who have found there way here, my total lack of time to commit to this project has just been horribly reinforced by de-motivation.

In my imagination, when I am not feeling so pressed by other concerns (like, say, funding, trying to start my research, being unable to keep up with my classes, and sleeping), I will be back. But the fact that I’ve said that in the last three entries DOES NOT BODE WELL.

Suggestions? Comments? All welcome.

As it turns out, I DID get a copy of Kirk Ormand’s Controlling Desires not for Thesmophoria but just in time for Christmas. That worked out well, because I got to read it all during our Winter Break. Except that I was so totally burnt out from last semester, that I actually mostly just hid in bed and read fantasy. Now that the semester has begun again, I’m slowly being forced out of my shell again, and Controlling Desires is a new and exciting part of my life (that, of course, I no longer actually have time to read - but procrastination from real reading is a powerful thing, so I expect it will go fast now).

Ormand leads with background on gender and sexuality and how we think about such things. Although he totally ties it to specifically Classical things, in retrospect I realize that it is lessons like this that led me to go for my PhD in anthropology. But enough about me, here’s the gist of that point:

We think about sex(uality) in fundamentally different ways than the ancient Greek and Romans did.

In another post - which WILL happen eventually, fear not - I will talk more about it.

In my imagination, I will also be posting about 1) Monsters! Yay! and 2) Hera and Medea! Oooooh!

I know, I know … a real post is coming soon. But in the meantime, this is a really awesome article:

The Glory That Was Greece From a Female Perspective

Persephone Again

Everyone wants to talk
about Persephone.
Especially the poets.
How she was grabbed
and carried off,
how she was kept in darkness
so many months,
while her mother searched everywhere,
waited for her darling
to come home.

Some say
the daughter
liked what had happened
(you know the story,
how women really want it
even when they say no),
others claim it is in fact
the mother who is at fault,
that it is she
who drove her daughter
away, forced her to
leave home and
flee into that hidden world,
because of her own impossible
demands.

And then of course
there are those
who read it as a simple
nature myth–six months
of fertility and sun,
six of winter and death
over the land.

What do I think?
I think she is the soul
of each of us,
going down to obscurity,
resurrecting like a flower
over and over
as the seasons return.

Dorothy Walters

December 10, 2008

This is reposted with permission from the poet from her blog: www.kundalinisplendor.blogspot.com

Hi. This is not the Monster Syncroblog post promised. Nope. In my imagination, I will get it done. Obviously, I have already missed the deadline. However, I have another deadline. Actually, 5 deadlines. All for major real world projects. I will spend every waking moment working on these projects until December 12. Then I will return here and start up with some more good stuff, especially some monsters and some feminist interpretations of myths.

In the meantime, go read some of the awesome people on my blogroll. Mahud put up his post for the syncroblog, for example (and links to the other responsible people). And J. Harker, my old pal, wrote a neato review of a book.

What else … oh! Does anyone want to buy me Kirk Ormand’s Controlling Desires for Thesmophoria? It has actually been published (earlier than expected!) but is slightly outside of my price range (which ranges all the way up to about $3.39). An equally awesome present would be to convince the University of Arizona to buy it so that I can borrow it.

INFP - The Idealists

The meaning-seeking and unconventional type. They are especially attuned to making sure their beliefs and actions are congruent. They often develop a passion for the arts or unusal forms of self-expression.

They enjoy work that are aligned to their deeply feelt values and tend to strongly dislike the more practical and mundande forms of tasks. They can enjoy working alone for long periods of time and are happiest when they can immerse themselves in personally meaningful projects.

Okay blogpeeps, do you think that’s accurate? And also: go see what you get over at the Typealyzer.

I’ve mentioned Byblis before, I think. The poor girl fell in love with her brother which eventually led to being turned into a spring. But how she got from point A to point B is the awesomeness of the myth. And, because he is possibly the coolest guy on the planet, J. Harker over at Tales of a Wayward Classicist did a fantastic translation/adaptation of her myth from the Metamorphoses.

Here’s a selection:

It steadily got worse. She’d dream about him.
Really dream about him, you know?
The kind of dreams she’d ache to go back to sleep for.
She hated when he called her sister.
Something wasn’t right. She knew it, but couldn’t say it. Wouldn’t.

…

We have to tell him. Can you? Can you talk to him?
I’m afraid. I don’t know what’ll happen if I open my mouth.
We’ll write him a letter.

Oh the awesomeness … Go read the whole thing.