A bold and dynamic retelling of five great male-female pairings from the Greek myths: Prometheus and Pandora, Jason and Medea, Oedipus and Antigone, Achilles and Thetis, and Odysseus and Penelope.
Award-winning historical novelist and playwright John Spurling draws on his lifelong love and knowledge of Classical Greek drama and poetry to reanimate five great male–female storylines from the Greek myths.
The Greek myths, refined by the great poets and playwrights of ancient Greece, distil the essence of human life: its brief span, its pride, courage, and insecurity, its anxious relationship with the natural world—earth, sea, and sky, represented by powerful gods and monsters.
Taking inspiration from the incomparably beautiful and intense poetry of Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, John Spurling—a lifelong classicist and an award-winning playwright—spins five myths for contemporary readers. These captivating tales center on male-female pairs—Prometheus and Pandora, Jason and the sorceress Medea, Oedipus and his daughter Antigone, Achilles and his mother Thetis, Odysseus and Penelope—who, in the course of their stories, destroyed dynasties, raised and felled heroes, and sealed the fates of men.
"In Arcadian Days: Gods, Women, and Men From Greek Myths, John Spurling retells the single and shared stories of five pairs of males and females. Mr. Spurling, an English author and playwright, has introduced substantial passages of dialogue, a narrative choice that has the effect of adding slow-building dread and pathos.”
"The novelist and playwright retells five Greek myths focused on male-female pairs, including Odysseus and Penelope, Oedipus and Antigone, and Prometheus and Pandora.”
"In this last, Spurling unexpectedly makes Odysseus a first-person narrator, allowing the reader to be privy to the hero’s thoughts. This shift in perspective proves breathtakingly successful in creating suspense, especially in the penultimate scene when a tattered beggar, mocked by Penelope’s boorish suitors, picks up Odysseus’s bow and checks to be sure that it is still sound."
Praise for John Spurling’s Arcadian Nights:
