So last year Breakfast With Pandora cast the Aeneidwith 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
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)?
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:
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:
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.
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.
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!
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.
Despite the fact that we so often refer to the ancient Greeks for our whole obsession with Democracy here in the U.S., most of us acknowledge that it wasn’t all Skittles and Slice. Beyond the obvious difficulties of actually involving the populace, and the relatively short time the radical idea was implemented, exactly who the demos was was also in question. Women were not citizens (so forget Sarah Palin for VP), and thus could not vote (among other things), and the definition of a citizen male wouldn’t be exactly obvious to a contemporary democrat. For example, Barack Obama would not be a citizen in Ancient Greece because his father was not a citizen. Even if he was eligible by lineage, upward mobility from landless, impovershed kid to landed (and horsed, for that matter) man would have been nearly impossible and thus, again, he would not have been a citizen.
And now that I’ve shared that little tidbit, I’m back to my “real” work.
I was playing on Gender Analyzer and discovered that I am a man.
I’m actually not (although I’ve gotten emails from wingnuts telling me I can’t possibly be a woman), but I am extremely curious what the heck it is that makes me sound manly.
I’m taking a class in sociolinguistics now, and really enjoying it. This program would be an interesting thing to write a paper on (not mine though). But I think it would be fascinating to find out what’s involved? And what would such a study have looked like in ancient Greece?
Sadly, I doubt there are enough extant texts to make such a call, but wouldn’t it be interesting to know?
I’m doing a bunch of projects on sexuality and adolescence in school and I happened to come across this gem: a girl insisting that if you “jump up and down a lot, the stuff will fall out of you and you won’t get pregnant.” Now, it so happens that I have heard plenty of similar things during my few years as a sex educator, so it doesn’t surprise me, but it is SO close to Galen’s idea that I mentioned in my post on ancient Greek sexual health that I couldn’t help but be a little excited.
And, just in case you, too, are tempted by this logic, allow me to correct you. Jumping does not prevent pregnancy, douching does not prevent pregnancy (and may actually increase your risks), having sex during your period does not prevent pregnancy, and withdrawal does not prevent pregnancy (although that last one does at least decrease your chances some).
You must know how I love putting pictures with my posts, but I have no image of a teen jumping around trying to eject semen and I would probably risk prosecution if I did. Oh well.
My favorite holiday of the year is coming up very very soon!
In my first year of college I was Arachne. It was awesome. And if there weren’t quite so many awesome amazing women to dress up like left, I would be her again. I walked around campus with an enormous spider hugging my torso and a noose hanging from my neck. I’ll grant that my peasant-skirt and bright red vest with cleavage only a freshman girl feels no shame at had little to do with an historically accurate representation, but that costume - and the make-up - was amazing. Awesome. Off the chain, even.
So this year? I’m not absolutely sure yet. At first I thought of Medea, but then I was like, hmmm, maybe carrying around two bloody baby dolls is a bit much outside of a Haunted House. The next thought was of a monster, and trying to get away from the overly dark Medea costume, I considered the sexy Sirens. But the thing is, being half birds, that’s more of a costume than I can throw together from my quite limited wardrobe. (Particularly now that my partner has been making me throw away the more eccentric parts of it and insidiously replacing them with very classy pants, skirts, and shirts that would be appropriate at any dinner party or office meeting.)
So now I’m thinking about Delphyne with cut off hands in a basket and dragon-y make-up to make the point, or Demeter with some sheafs of wheat and a crown or something, or Selene and make my partner dress up like Endymion. What do you think I should be? (Keep in mind, I’m not going to a party, this is just for handing out candy.) What are YOU planning on dressing up like this year?
Watch out, Paleothea is about to get partisan. What little readership I have does not come here for this, but this is how I see the world, and yes, I think it relates to ancient Greece.
Women’s health, it is helpfully explained to us, is not like men’s health. For one thing, simply being a virgin past the “appropriate age” (14-17?) makes a girl susceptible to hysteria and suicidal insanity. Hippocrates’ solution to this: “My prescription is that when virgins experience this trouble, they should cohabit with a man as quickly as possible. If they become pregnant, they will be cured.” There are plenty of variations on this them, but it all reinforces the idea of women as, essentially, mothers.
That said, even Hippocrates recognized that pregnancy held many dangers for women. If abortion was anathema (and it wasn’t for everyone, Galen gives a useful prescription of jumping up and down to expel a fetus which he says actually worked in his office when his kinswomen brought in a slave-girl she was prostituting - it wasn’t an act of kindness, the kinswoman just didn’t want to lose her money-maker), it was at least partly because abortifacients were generally so dangerous, including severe bloodletting and “sharp-edged” things that wounded adjacent parts.
Remember, these are people who thought that the womb moved around the body like a furry animal and could be moved back into place (if it had traveled too low) by giving her sweet-scented wine to drink (the carrot) and burning “foul-scented vapours below her womb” (the stick). But damn, at least these people were trying …
You may have heard by now about Nailin’ Paylin. It’s being made by Larry Flint and that’s really all you need to know.
Although I understand people’s anger, I think that’s exactly what Flint is challenging. I see it as a critique of Palin’s and the West’s (especially the U.S.’s) hypocrisy about sex and sexiness.
What is it that makes her sexual portrayal of herself in beauty contests more acceptable than her portrayal in porn except for societal values about the lines of acceptable sexuality? (Well, that and consent - but that’s why it’s a critique.) As a beauty queen she is like Artemis, irresistible but untouchable (think of Actaeon, people). But make her Aphrodite’s devotee, as porn star/sex worker in this scenario, but it could as easily have been as sex education advocate (remember Jocelyn Elders‘ ideas about masturbation?), and she would be perceived as vulgar. As she is now, beautiful and inaccessible but also the “ideal” mother, Palin is a walking reinforcement of patriarchal standards of acceptable womanhood; she’s a friggin’ Hestia for goodness sake.
As for the inclusion of Condi and Hillary, these two women have generally been cast in our culture as Athena and Hera, respectively. Condi as the asexual woman who is the Man’s scion (Bush as Zeus here) extending His power; Hillary as the long-suffering wife who cannot be sexy except in the context of her stereotypically sexist relationship (Bill Clinton as Zeus here) and longs for ultimate power in her own right. And yet, sadly, they are both the symbols of success for woman in this culture. This video turns that on its head, challenging public conceptions, expectations, and values that are sadly consistent with some from ancient Greece.
By thrusting them without consent into Aphrodite’s realm, Larry Flint reminds us of the violence inherent in our current portrayals of acceptable gender and sexuality. If we could embrace Aphrodite - the erotic - in our public and private lives, it would take us far closer to the equality we long for.*
I figure most of my readers are going to disagree with me, and that’s fine. One of the best things about a video like this, no matter where you fall on the issue, is the discussion that it motivates. Passionate discussion. Because sex matters and gender matters and they matter even more in politics, the public forum for our national identities.
*And there, too Aphrodite is should be our teacher as longing, himeros, is under her jurisdiction.
This book is the bomb. Really. If you are truly interested in ancient Greek myth, you should own this book. It’s typically used as an college textbook in Mythology classes and has 1105 pages, but if you need just one reference, this should be it.
It has everything. It quotes big chunks of original text (including the complete Medea and the Bacchae), it relates Greek stuff to other cultures (Egyptian, Babylonian, etc.), it puts a significant amount of information about the goddesses into the patriarchal framework of the culture, it talks about the feminist alternatives, it has new archaeological and anthropological studies on the Great Goddess, it has a section on modern European and American art, it even has a website where you can go for chapter outlines, quizzes, and learning objectives making it a fantastic resource for teachers.
And yet, for some reason, I virtually ignored this book for the past 7 or so years. I don’t know why. I was young and foolish and thought I knew all there was to know (hey, I was literally a sophomore). I didn’t even include it on this site’s References page.
It has theory, it has original sources, it has information about worship, it has pretty color pictures. My goddess, what is NOT to adore?
So please, if you read this blog because you are genuinely interested in Classical Mythology, do yourself a favor and go buy this book. It cost me $100, but you can get it used for $30 over at fetchbook.info. I swear that I’m not taking bribes to write this, I just care about your access to quality stuff.
Gut reaction, without thinking about it too much: Which are better, multi-generational households or nuclear familes? Why?
A big controversy in scholarship on the Roman family (and history of the family in general) is whether multi-generational households or nuclear families were the norm. At stake, as so often, is not simply accurate reconstruction of historical reality, but coded policy prescriptions for the present. Scholars from the left and the right have been curiously united in arguing that a) in the pre-modern/pre-industrial period, multi-generational households were standard, and b) that was way better than the situation we have now. Those on the left see multi-gen. units as a healthier, more supportive way to live; Marxists in particular regard the nuclear family as an artifact of the rise of industrialism, which separated the locus of production (the workplace) from the locus of reproduction (the home), with all sorts of negative consequences. Meanwhile, right-wing historians envisage a golden age of multi-generational families headed by a strong patriarch, in which a strong division of gender roles was maintained, children respected and obeyed their elders, and everyone was generally less individualistic, materialistic, and selfish than they are now. Also, they had less (of the bad kind of) sex. (Apparently this image of the Roman family provided crucial support for the family policies of Mussolini’s Italy.)
If you spend a while reading this stuff, you can start to wonder what anyone ever saw in the nuclear family. I put the same question to my students, and got an interesting range of responses, from the woman who had grown up in a multi-generational household and loved it (more support for everybody), to the one who came from a large nuclear family and so didn’t feel the need for any more people in the house (this is a Catholic school, after all), to those who thought that adding grandparents to their homes would create intolerable authority conflicts. We all thought it could be nice to have the extended family close enough to rally around in times of crisis, but we had different estimates of how close was too close — much like y’all.
P.S. Current consensus, again in case you were wondering, is that nuclear families have been the norm in most times and places, in large part due to simple demographic reality. In ancient Rome, roughly 2/3 of adults would have lost their fathers by age 25; it was difficult enough to keep two generations alive at once, much less three. Of course, there’s more to it than that — isn’t there always? — but this post is probably long and boring enough already.
This is a guest post by my undergrad Roman Religions professor, Adfamiliares, and she is - as you have obviously noticed by now - the bomb diggity. She has her own blog type thing at adfamiliares.livejournal.com, too!
I just got an email that brings up what I think is a very important point, and one that I give a great deal of thought to. Rather than attempt to summarize, I will include the email and my response in their entirety here.
From: JC
Subject: Goddess Aphrodite
To: ailiathena@yahoo.com
Date: Monday, August 18, 2008, 5:19 PM
I was very disappointed in your wording describing the most elegant and beautiful Goddess ( in my opinion), Aphrodite. Although, the summary of her “life” is well thought out and the pictures are beautiful as well.
I began reading the Marriageportion first and I was surprised, to say the least, that you used “low class” words such as; “getting it on”, “pissed off”, “laughing their butts off”. Needless to say I stopped at that point and had to write hoping you will replace the words to be suitable for the lovely and fair, Aphrodite.
I hope that when I return the Goddess Aphrodite can and will be proud.
Dear JC,
I think I appreciate where you’re coming from. It sounds - please correct me if I’ve misunderstood - that my descriptions seem to you to be disrespectful to Aphrodite and perhaps also to Her worshipers.
It is a difficult thing for me to respond to. On the one hand, the last thing I would ever want to do is insult anyone LEAST of all a goddess. Furthermore, I certainly agree with you that Aphrodite is undeniably beautiful and classy. On the other hand, my choice of words is not unintentional, nor are my irreverent - or “low class” if you prefer - colloquialisms. I have a few different goals with this website, but one of the biggest is to engage younger and less informed readers. Secondarily, I seek to bring some of that ancient mythical world into the realm of possibility for contemporary readers, well-read or otherwise. And finally, obviously all of the myths that we have recorded come to us from aristocratic ancient Greek writers, but the deities, Aphrodite in particular, were by no means worshiped only by aristocrats. Remember that she is also the patron Goddess of prostitutes and not just upper class courtesans or priestess prostitutes, either. Remembering her as ONLY elegant is, I think, to lessen the profound impact that she had on her celebrants. Beyond that, if you read the myths in the original sources (check out the References page for more about where), I think it is clear that all was not cucumber sandwiches and croquet in many of the myths of Aphrodite (or, indeed, ANY of the Olympian gods).
I hope that you understand why I will not be changing my descriptions and accept my sincerest apologies if they have offended.
I’m actually not in Ecuador anymore and have successfully moved across the United States to my new home by the University where I’m going for my MA and then PhD. That’s why 1) I haven’t posted recently and 2) I may end up punking out on this blog. But here’s hoping I can keep up with it all and keep this baby running.
So anyway, back to the Ancient Greek Ladies. Sort of.
While I was visiting Quito, I encountered the very beautiful Virgin of Quito. I fell in love. This is a virgin who is also called “The Dancing Woman” and “The Woman of the Apocalypse.” It was the latter name that helped me put the pieces together: crown of 12 stars, check; moon under her feet, check; dragon, check; shiny clothes, check; eagle wings, check; this chick is straight out of Revelation! So I dug out my trusty old New Oxford Annotated Bible and read what it had to say.
One well-known version of the story tells of the goddess Leto, pregnant with Apollo [and Artemis, thank you very much], who is menaced by the dragon Python who pursues her because he knows that Apollo [geez, stop forgetting Artemis!] is destined to kill him. Here this material is reinterpreted in terms of Jewish traditions and expectations as the story of the birth of the Messiah.
So there you have it. I’m excited. I love stuff like this. Sychretism=my favorite.
P.S. Do that poll thingie. I don’t feel like this blog fits too easily into any one of those categories, but hopefully you’ll disagree and help me with registering this durn thing in other people’s lists.
df at Breakfast With Pandora just wrote a fantastic post. I am jealous. I wish I’d written it. Starting off discussing Nausicaa, he soon moves into the power of stories (remembered myths) in shaping our lives and particularly the question of our cultures’ approaches to children’s independance. One line I particularly wish I’d written:
I believe in the power of retelling this type of experience. I believe that we build ourselves up by building up our own history, our worthwhile narratives, the myths, the traditional “good stories” of our lives. I believe that when we suppress the events of our lives and do not recount them, parts of us are destroyed, never to return.
You can always tell a healthy family, for example, by the amount of stories it tells on itself.
I could not agree more.
This post is what I like best about when people write about myth. I’d do more of it myself if it weren’t so hard to do it well. It is a big part of why I studied Classics in the first place. A good academic example of such writing is, for example Somewhere I Have Never Traveled: A Hero’s Journey, by Classics prof. Thomas Van Nortwick. It’s not so much about current events or culture as how “The ancient hero’s quest for glory offers metaphors for our own struggles to reach personal integrity and wholeness.”
Carla over at The English Teacher’s Blog posted an entry about some dude’s presentation that I thought might be pretty interesting to the people who are interested in how Greek myths stay relevant to public education. The three main points of his presentation, she reports, are:
The future is unpredictable.
Students are networked.
The new information landscape is flat, less authority (teacher)-driven.
She goes on to discuss how some students are more networked than others, but in the sub/urban schools I’ve worked in, they managed to stay networked even without a computer at home.
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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?
hology classes and has 1105 pages, but if you need just one reference, this should be it.
