Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

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 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!)

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!

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.

I grew up reading D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, like lots of kids, and credit it with my early inspiration to create my website, Women in Greek Myths. But, I should add, it was a negative inspiration. I had decided that they didn’t have all the facts (a horrible crime to a know-it-all 13 year old) and worse, they didn’t tell all the stories (I shudder now to imagine a book that WOULD), and so I set out to correct it. I imagined the website as a place where I could store my notes, notes that would eventually become a fantastic book that would replace the insufficient D’Aulaires.

Now, as an adult, and having a lot more of the “real” stories under my belt, and in the original Greek, no less [Ailia pats herself on back], I have changed my tune. I am hugely impressed by D’Aulaires giving it 5/5 stars over at Goodreads, and I realize that what they did by connecting all of the different, winding tales together was genius. Sure, it makes you think that it’s how Greek myths really are - like some Biblical narrative where everything is essentially working together and rarely out and out contradictory - but the alternative, especially for kids, seems virtually impossible. And, even though I don’t think that the illustrations are up there with, say, with The Forbidden Door, almost no one’s are, and it DOES have some of the absolute best scene depictions of Greek myths I have ever seen (for example, the one with Syrinx and Daphne being chased at once).

But, in its attempt to be univerally acceptable, it has not only toned down the violence against women (which I don’t think is so bad anymore),  it also pretty much erased any mention of myths that would now be considered queer. (And I use that word as a blanket term that includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, etc.) So, you don’t see any of the stories from my post on Transgender Myths To Know. And you don’t see any of the stories that turn up in Lovers’ Legends Unbound. And Hylas and Ganymede are turned from the beloveds of heroes (Heracles) and gods (Zeus), to mere victims of nymphs and cupbearers.

Some day, I have just decided, I’m going to write a book.* It will not be an attempt to replace D’Aulaires, but it will reject their silencing of those stories. The Greeks didn’t view Zeus or Heracles as “gay” or Caenis as “trans” but our current definitions made them invisible (at least partly). If I write a children’s book, something like The Other Greek Myths, I will attempt to do much of what the D’Aulaires did so successfully. I have no goal to shock, and my intent is not to preserve an ancient Greek way of life, but to use the myths as we have always done, to highlight stories we find relevant. There is, for the first time in a long time, room for such a book (thanks to books like And Tango Makes Three), and, with the help of an artist (maybe I could convince someone like Erika Meriaux to jump on board?) I think it could be something really special.

*The 13-year-old in my head makes me add that I’ll include a note for grown ups at the end contextualizing the thing.

So as must be obvious to many of you, I love Goodreads.com. Whenever I talk about any good book, I provide a link there. I might be able to pick up a little pocket change by referring you to Amazon.com instead, or make you more likely to support the world by sending you to Better World Books, but I keep linking to Goodreads because it’s an opportunity for community interaction. It’s a great opportunity to share and talk and all such good things.

Although my recent reading has been dominated by more professional interests like anthropology, immigration, and adolescent sexuality, I recently heard from my awesome professor Kirk Ormand is coming out with a new book as soon as December 30, 2008! You better believe I’ll be reviewing it here when it does, but until then, go check out Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome.

And if you want to be my Goodreads buddy and share opinions on books, then drop me a comment and I’ll send you an invite.  Fair warning: joining Goodreads may suck up all of your free time, but it is an awesome way to waste it.

This is a series on Penelope, who rocks and everyone should know more about. The breakdown is based on my reading (in ancient Greek, thank you very much) of the Odyssey and with some help from Jenny Strauss Clay, Nancy Felson-Rubin, and Sheila Murnaghan. Read Goddess-Like Penelope (Part 1), Hera-Like Penelope,  Artemis-Like Penelope,  Aphrodite-Like Penelope, and Athena-Like Penelope below.

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The end of the Odyssey is no surprise. The tale is not, contrary to what Felson-Rubin suggests, open-ended, leaving the audience on their edges of their seats to guess what will happen. Rather, as in the Iliad, we are pulled into the lives of the characters. We empathize. We feel Penelope’s confusion in that laugh she forces through her teeth. But we do not fear what the end of the story will bring.

Felson-Rubin says, “the references to her possible inconstancy form a virtual leitmotif,” and I do not disagree. (Felson-Rubin, 164) But rather than argue that this inconstancy (ie, the possibility that she will abandon Odysseus and go off with one of the Suitors) pulls the audience into doubt, it seems clear to me that it serves the same end as the scene between Hector and Andromache in Book Six of the Iliad. Hector’s confident reassurance pulls at our hearts as does Andromache’s; we know the end will not bring them joy and we suffer through their hope. Similarly, our hearts go out to the humanity of Penelope. Unlike “god-like Odysseus,” who is so god-like, in fact, he not only gets to see what’s happening in the plot, but have a degree of control over it, Penelope can only think about what is going on. We feel distress at her distress. We sympathize with her brave attempt to continue down the correct path without evening knowing which god is steering her fate. Her uncertainty is the reality of all humankind, and it is only acknowledging her confusion and her perseverance that the Odyssey reaches its true depth.

Did you hear me people? Penelope isn’t just a side show, she is what makes it deep.

Her uncertainty draws us deeply into the story, but it does not cause us to question the outcome. I clearly remember my feelings when I read Penelope’s entreaty to Artemis to slay her and take her away from the unbearable pain of living without Odysseus. I was not afraid, any more than any ancient Greek would have been, that she would die at the hand of that “arrow-pouring” goddess. In fact, the cry reinforced the realization that it is not Artemis who has her hand in the mix, but Athena. She will not die, she cannot die, and there is no doubt of that to any with the least familiarity with the story (as most ancient Greeks certainly would have). There is, however, a contest, and a marriage is clearly in the works, so perhaps it would be harder to deny the certainty of how the story will end. To this point, I must argue the same line as those who suggest suspense: Penelope does not know what’s going on. She has constructed the contest in such a way that she continues to have options, and as far as she’s concerned both Aphrodite’s Life and Artemis’ Death are alternatives. It cannot be stressed enough, though, that her uncertainty is not ours. Even if we don’t know Penelope’s inner thoughts, we are positive that Athena and Odysseus are prepared for the contest of the bow. So you see? The contest is another example of Penelope’s cunning, and another example of how it is Athena’s option - that of Survival - that is in store for Penelope.

In the end, Penelope is a mixture of all the goddesses and none of them, like all humans. She is exceptional in form and prudence, of lofty stature, accomplished in skill, and a participant in a most wonderful of marriages. Despite her exceptional nature, we do not see Penelope as a goddess, but as irrevocably and amazingly human. The presence of each goddess reminds us of who this wife of Odysseus truly, complexly, is and reiterates how, inevitably, the story will end. Her story gives us all hope that we, too, will reach our happy endings without ever really knowing which hand guides us.

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Felson-Rubin, Nancy. “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Seth L. Schein, ed. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1996

This is a series on Penelope, who rocks and everyone should know more about. The breakdown is based on my reading (in ancient Greek, thank you very much) of the Odyssey and with some help from Jenny Strauss Clay, Nancy Felson-Rubin, and Sheila Murnaghan. Read Goddess-Like Penelope, Hera-Like Penelope, and Artemis-Like Penelope below.

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Aphrodite, on the other hand, offers Penelope New Life. The myths of the Goddess of Love are in many ways the most applicable to Penelope’s situation. Think, for example, of the fling she had with Ares, the God of War while she was still Hephaestus’ wife, or the fact that it was her intervention that caused Helen to leave Menelaus and elope with Paris, thus beginning the Trojan War. These are examples of Dalliance as described by Nancy Felson-Rubin.

Nevertheless, Aphrodite does not merely advocate free love in this scenario but new marriage. This is particularly noticeable in the quotation below where it is she, and not the Protectress of Marriage (Hera), who petitions Zeus for the marriage of the daughters of Pandareos. When Penelope washes her face in the ambrosia of Aphrodite (18.185), the hardship, the old weighing life she had, falls away and she is born anew, just as the Goddess of Beauty ritually renews herself in the sea.

So if Aphrodite is running the show, Penelope would do well to go ahead and choose one of the Suitors for her husband and start a new life with him. Likewise, if Artemis is running the show, the only option that will bring her relief is a chaste death. Hera, as we saw in a previous post, is not well-equipped to help women in Penelope’s position and indeed, barely manages when her own husband isn’t in eye-sight.

It’s also worth noting that Aphrodite is a powerful goddess, and more of a personality in the Odyssey than Artemis - who, as you may recall from the last post, represents the chaste-death option for Penelope. Helen, who comes down the stairs looking like Artemis, of all people, is the one who makes that power most obvious. Helen takes no responsibility for her behavior; she was forced, she says, by Aphrodite. Poor Penelope. She knows the story of Helen, and that of Klytaimnestra, and so she knows the influences that Aphrodite can have on women’s lives when she chooses to interfere. But she does not know which goddess is running the show in her own life, and is caught in between trying to decide on the correct direction.

Felson-Rubin, Nancy. “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Seth L. Schein, ed. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1996

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Next week: Which goddess is Penelope really like?

This is a series on Penelope, who rocks and everyone should know more about. The breakdown is based on my reading (in ancient Greek, thank you very much) of the Odyssey and with some help from Jenny Strauss Clay, Nancy Felson-Rubin, and Sheila Murnaghan. Read Goddess-Like Penelope and Hera-Like Penelope below.

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Artemis, the Virgin Goddess of the Hunt, is directly, and somewhat confusingly, compared to Penelope. Artemis, most frequently described as hagnê, pure, is alternatively depicted as possessing a particularly lofty stature and as being incredibly deadly, most especially to women . This isn’t surprising, since she is often understood to represent the time in the life of a parthenos, or virgin, directly before marriage: a time as desirable as it is off-limits.

In the quotation I mention Part 1, Artemis offers her “lofty stature” to the daughters of Pandareos but ultimately the daughters died. Penelope actually prays to be destroyed her like them. Felson-Rubin calls this plot-type the Bride of Death but I would combine it with Tease because of the parthenos, or virgin, aspect of the Goddess and what that means. It is worth pointing out that, ultimately, Penelope cannot ask Artemis for the marriage that a virgin girl would be looking forward to. Her husband’s big house and her grown son Telemachus are constant reminders that the only gift Artemis can give to Penelope is the violent one. Death can keep her from “not only an unwanted marriage, but betrayal and infidelity as well” (Felson-Rubin, 181).

If Penelope is like Artemis in the Odyssey, it must be in her longing for Death.

Because the Wayward Classicist did it:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next few sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the closest.

“So if the three goddesses took the apple immediately to Paris on Mount Ida to have him judge which was the fairest, at least 18 years had to pass before Achilles arrived in Troy. In any event, the judgment of Paris, Priam and Hecuba’s supposedly dead son, was swayed by the awesome force of love when, over bribes of power and wisdom, he chose the love of the most beautiful woman in the world - Helen of Sparta.”

- from Robert Bell’s Women of Classical Mythology in the section on Aphrodite

You may have picked up from previous entries that I really dig Penelope, but now you’ll start to understand why in this series!

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There has been a great deal of work done in recent years to “reclaim” the Goddess. Women look to Her for spiritual guidance, for wisdom, for empowerment. They call out to Her by her various names. I myself participate in this new Goddess movement to some degree and it makes sense to me to see goddesses as archetypes guiding or reflecting human behavior. Furthermore, this seems to apply flawlessly to reading the Odyssey, especially as relates to the much-debated action of Penelope.

There are many goddesses in the Odyssey, Kalypso and Kirke come to mind, but it is the Olympian goddesses - specifically, Hera, Artemis, Aphrodite, and Athena - who so nicely guide our perceptions of Penelope and the outcome of the story. These four only show up once all together, in the context of Penelope’s confusing metaphor describing the daughters of Pandareos:

Hera gave them form and prudence surpassing all other women; pure Artemis gave them an lofty stature, and Athena taught them to do renowned works. When bright Aphrodite had ascended to holy Olympus seeking the accomplishment of a blooming wedding for the girls from thunder-loving Zeus (for well does he know everything, both what shall happen and what not happen to mortal humans) the Snatching winds came and snatched them away and gave them to the hated Furies to care for.

Each of these goddesses has a different gift to give the unfortunate Pandareides and they each have a similar role in the greater telling of the Odyssey. Nancy Felson-Rubin has already done a good job of identifying plot-types, however, by seeing the role of each goddess tied into the story more clearly, the function of those plot-types takes on a different meaning. Felson-Rubin states, “Until 23.205 [the end of the Odyssey] even the knowing reader feels suspense as to whether Penelope or Odysseus will happily reunite,” but I hope to show that what the audience, and the reader, feels is not suspense but empathy, suspense being impossible in a story where the end is known. And with a story this famous, who could fail to know the end?

Felson-Rubin, Nancy. “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Seth L. Schein, ed. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1996

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Coming soon: Part 2 - the roles of the Goddesses

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.

In 2005, the famous Margaret Atwood published The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus. Whether or not you have actually read the Odyssey (or generally know the story), it is interesting. It is the story from Penelope’s point of view. But don’t expect to find the mysterious, heroic, wily Penelope of the Odyssey. Nope, here she is presented in her own words and she spends much less energy on her responsibilities as the Queen of Ithaca and the mother of the future king and her husband than she does on her day-to-day life while the Suitors were there and her rivalry with Helen. There’s also a lot more attention given to the maids.

Now the maids, you may recall from the Odyssey, are hanged at the end of the story because they were disloyal to the ruling family by 1) sleeping with the Suitors and 2) telling them stuff. The sex part is - I suspect - woefully misunderstood by the majority of people who read it. The Penelopiad definitely fills in one angle of that story that you won’t get elsewhere. It illustrates world of women, the world of powerless people. Check out Slave-Girl’s Goddesses for some background from my perspective.

The thing is, it’s not the best book. Despite Atwood’s insinuations that what we are hearing from Penelope’s own mouth should not be trusted, to me, the book is pedantic and reads more like a really good writing exercise than anything else (she includes random interludes by a Chorus of maids). It is not Atwood’s best. And frankly, if you are really interested in Penelope, you can get a much deeper, much more interesting, and much more emotionally relevant portrayal by going back and re-reading chunks of the Odyssey (plus some of the scholarship about her if you’re really committed). If, however, the Odyssey seems like too big a task and you want to color in the parts of your mental image of ancient Greece involving women and slaves, it’s worth a look. It’s a quick read, anyway.

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.

*To give proper credit where it’s due, I should note that most of this is drawn from Suzanne Dixon’s The Roman Family. Full treatment of the demographic data is in Richard Saller’s Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family.

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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 got home yesterday from Ecuador and the nicest thing I saw when I got back to my place was my dear old reference books scattered all over the floor. There’s a bunch I rely on. I keep meaning to review them in some form here, but I guess I’m not really much of a reviewer. If you’re interested in what I recommend, you should check out my Bibliography.

If not then you probably won’t be interested in what follows either, but I won’t let that stop me! Books I want to add to my collection include:

Female Power and Male Dominance: On the Origins of Sexual Inequality

Recommended to me by Carol Christ herself, and by an anthropologist (Peggy Reeves Sanday) that I respect.

Spartan Women

By the impressive Classicist Sarah Pomeroy, who I frequently refer to and quote liberally. Also, I know almost nothing about Spartan women, most of my ladies come from an Athenian perspective.

Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece

Legal cases are crucial to our understanding of ancient Greek life, and of all the ancient Greek lives I could learn about, Neaira’s seems to be among the most fascinating.

Greek Religion and Society

Seems like a good place to start for me since my Classical background is so heavily literary and mythic. That’s the same reason I want to read Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece and Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean recommended to me via Anahita-L.

The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece

I’m not sure why I didn’t read this in college, but I want to remedy that as soon as possible. Winkler founded this branch of Classical research in many ways.

Greek Nymphs: Myth, Cult, Lore

I’ve got Amazons covered, but I’m ready to learn more about these wily lovable women.

Lavinia

By favorite author Ursula K. LeGuin, this is actually a historical fiction about the silent princess from the Aeneid. Promises to be interesting - and you can even buy it at the airport!

I used to just buy the books with an interesting title, but I’ve learned the hard way that that doesn’t yield the best information. Recommendations are better. So recommend! Are there any other books you’ve read that were particularly relevant and accurate? Do you know anything about any on this list? Please comment and tell me about them!

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.”

I’ve been taking advantage of my two-month break in the isolation to read books that I’ve previously attempted and utterly failed to complete. Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane certainly falls in that category. The second chapter, “Sacred Time and Myths,” reminded me of a common question I get in emails asking for “when” the gods were born. That question – in many cases – can be answered in the context of other god’s births or a larger myth, but in terms of years? Forget about it.

Adfamiliares (who taught me everything I know about Roman Religion, and is a pretty cool cat) made a comment about how different that is from the Christian tradition. Eliade explains it by saying “Christianity radically changed the experience and the concept of liturgical time, and this is due to the fact that Christianity affirms the historicity of the person of Christ.” (72) But the “sacred” time in which the myths of the ancient Greeks took place “is an ontological mythical, Parmenidean time; it always remains equal to itself, it neither changes nor is exhausted.” (69)

Most of the myths I’ve collected on my site involve mortal men and women set in a past that has the potential for being “infinitely repeatable” in a ritual sense. It does not seem like a big leap, to me, to include in that category such stories as those that make up the narratives of the Eleusian Mysteries, or even the stories like that of Adonis, whose death was also ritually noted each year.

But Eliade suggests that “we moderns” cannot possibly appreciate the transportation via ritual and myth into the eternal sacred time of our foremothers and fathers. I think, however, when I tell the myths to my nephews and nieces, they are as transported as a child 2000 years ago. What do you think?

Hey! Check out this translation of the Aeneid! It’s by a chick!!! (Rare for a bloody epic, and it apparently made a difference.)

Now normally I don’t really get as excited about Roman stuff, but the article over at LanguageHat.com is what really sold me. Looking at the translations (originally reported by Jennifer Howard at the Chronicle Review) next to each other, hers is really far and away the most moving to me.

To reproduce a couple:

Little Iulus, clutching
my right hand, keeps pace with tripping steps.
My wife trails on behind. And so we make our way
along the pitch-dark paths, and I who had never flinched
at the hurtling spears or swarming Greek assaults —
now every stir of wind, every whisper of sound
alarms me, anxious both for the child beside me
and burden on my back. — translated by Robert Fagles (2006)

My little Iulus’ fingers
Were twined in mine; he trotted by my long steps.
Behind me came my wife. We went our dark way.
Before I hadn’t minded the Greeks’ spears
Hurled at me, or the Greeks in crowds, attacking.
Now every gust and rustle panicked me
Because of whom I led and whom I carried. — translated by Sarah Ruden (2008)

Howard lists a few other versions, but I would otherwise pick up Fagles’ edition, myself. So check out poet and classicist Sarah Ruden’s blank verse The Aeneid: A New Verse Translation.

I love it that we imagined descendants of Classical Civilizations continue to retell Greek myths. Xena was like my favorite show EVARRR and going with my fellow Classics majors in college to see Troy and laughing at all the wrong times together was way fun. My favorite mythically inspired movie is, without question, O Brother Where Art Thou and who doesn’t like Mary Renault’s The King Must Die?

Obviously, these are not generally intended to give an accurate portrayal of what ancient Greek myths looked like or meant to ancient Greeks. And why should they? There aren’t any ancient Greeks around to appreciate such efforts anyway! There are, on the other hand, plenty of people like you and me who are finding ways to make those stories relevant to our lives in entirely different and equally “valid” ways. It’s a great opportunity for social introspection.

On the other hand, sometimes it drives me nuts. Instead of looking at how Disney’s Hercules made Hera our hero’s birthmom (to take one tiny example) and saying, “How fascinating that they refuse to even allow the hint of Zeus’ infidelity, this really says something about our culture’s approach to raising children,” people smile and nod as their kids reel off the version as definitive. The problem here is that these stories become privileged. They start getting cited as proof of correct behavior because “it’s always been this way.”

It ain’t Disney’s fault any more than its Mary Renault’s fault or my fault as creator of paleothea.com or even your fault, dear reader. It’s how stories work. It’s why they are so powerful, so important.