Some Zeusy gossip as novelist explains eternal fascination with the myths of ancient Greece
the story and reclaiming their voices. The things you see in Greek myth, the misogyny and victim blaming, is not something that has seemed to have moved on very much in some ways in the last 3,000 years.
“There seemed to be such a connection there, and that these aren’t dusty, irrelevant stories from the past.”
Saint has turned her hand to another mythical retelling with her next novel, Elektra, which will hit bookstands in the spring. Elektra is not the most sympathetic character in the Greek canon but Saint wanted to move beyond the tendency for the ancient Greeks (and some modern Hollywood moguls) to portray women as one-dimensional monsters.
She said: “It really drew me to telling her story and made it more difficult to do. I used Medusa in Ariadne, who was literally a monster, and it’s such an opportunity to go into these women’s minds and explore why they did what they did.
“Wanting to do a feminist take on these stories does not mean portraying the women as perfect or superheroes. I want to explore these very complex, very flawed characters because they’re interesting and are what we really want to read about.”
The stories of the ancient Greeks have been a rich seam for Hollywood over the years.
Movies such as Jason And The Argonauts in 1963 and 1981’s Clash Of The Titans, starring Laurence Olivier as Zeus and which was loosely based on the Greek myth of Perseus, have become cult classics while there was a more recent resurgence with blockbusters 300 and Troy, starring Gerard Butler and Brad Pitt. Disney’s 1997 film Hercules saw ancient myth repackaged for children, with the animated movie boasting an impressive voice cast that included Danny DeVito and James Woods.
Next month, the ultimate supernatural crossover will hit the silver screen when two major mythologies stand side-by-side: the gods of ancient Greece and modern-day super heroes in Marvel’s Eternals.
Starring Richard Madden and directed by Oscar winner Chloé Zhao, Eternals tells the story of a group of aliens from the planet Olympia who have kept watch over the human race for 7,000 years. These humanoids are based on characters from Greek mythology, with Madden playing Ikaris, inspired by flew-tooclose-to-the-sun Icarus, Gemma Chan as Sersi, modelled on The Odyssey’s Circe, and Angelina Jolie taking on Thena, based on the Greek goddess Athena.
Ahead of Eternals’ release, and another explosion of interest, Isabel Ruffell, professor of Greek drama and culture at Glasgow University, said curiosity in these ancient stories and characters tended to come in cycles.
Over the years, Greek and Roman myths became revered classics, and it might seem to some like sacrilege to change the meaning of works by masters such as Sophocles and Euripides.
Yet turning old stories on their head has always been part of mythological tradition, as we continue to use ancient tales to understand our modern world.
“Once you shake yourself free of the shackles of the ancient author, you can do all sorts of things with them. They are not fixed, there’s no true version,” said Ruffell. “They were constantly being reused and repurposed in antiquity and there’s quite a lot of licence there for other people to come in and do their own thing.
“Suddenly Greece and Rome become fashionable. There was the whole sword and sandals thing in the ’50s and ’60s, and then it became unfashionable, before coming back in the early 2000s with Gladiator and Troy.
“The difference this time seems to be there’s more written fiction, but there has always been an element of that. Percy Jackson in the mid-2000s was huge.”
Ruffell explained that, while we are separated from the myths’ original orators by several millennia, we are still fascinated by their stories because our lives and priorities are not so different from the peoples who lived back then. She said: “There are a lot of really big issues here, like love, death and slavery. These are big subjects and we still have to deal with them. We get a lot of insight into the personal, so love, incest and adultery. You also get the big-ticket political stuff too.
“The ancient Greeks used myths as a kind of playground world where they could think about ideas. It was a way for them to step back from their lives and hold up a mythological mirror to themselves. Similarly, we use the myths today to give us freedom to think through things.”