How the world’s oldest stories are being radically reclaimed and retold by women both on screen and on the page
The tales may be as old as time but the myths of ancient Greece have been forever rewritten and rebooted to suit the changing times.
And now they are being revisited in the #MeToo era to give voice to the women who, if they appeared at all, were most often sidelined, tricked, lied to, abducted, assaulted and very often murdered.
Greek mythology has enjoyed a resurgence of popularity after a series of literary breakout bestsellers, retelling the old stories for new times.
Written by women authors and aimed at female audiences, these new takes on old legends reframe badly treated or maligned women from the original myths as the central figures of their own stories.
Many booksellers hail Madeline Miller’s The Song Of Achilles, which embraced the homoerotic undertones of Achilles’ relationship with his companion Patroclus in Homer’s Iliad, and tells of an epic love story between the two, as the start of the trend.
The book was published in 2011 but is now being discovered by a new generation of female readers and has built a robust online following, with the hashtag #thesongof achilles amassing more than 92 million views on TikTok.
Miller followed its success with a feminist retelling of another Greek myth in her 2018 novel Circe, which was a hit upon release. Last year, HBO Max announced it was adapting the book into an eight-part series.
Miller was closely followed by other writers who wanted to shine new light on to classical stories. Pat Barker’s The Silence Of The Girls was published in 2018 and a follow-up, The Women Of Troy, was released in August this year. A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes, an all-female perspective on the last days of Troy, was shortlisted for The Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2020, and scholar Claire Heywood released her debut novel Daughters Of Sparta earlier this year too.
Jennifer Saint, author of Sunday Times bestselling novel Ariadne, which tells the story of Theseus and the Minotaur from the Princess of Crete’s point of view, was directly influenced by the #MeToo movement while writing the book.
She said: “There was so much about women telling their side of