Mythos: A Retelling of the Myths of Ancient Greece

Towering above them all is the Roman poet ovid (43 bc–ad 17), whose Metamorphoses (Transformations) tells of those mortals, nymphs and others who were changed by the gods into animals, plants, rivers or even stones as a punishment or out of pity. His other works, principally the Ars Amatoria (Art of Love) and Heroides (Heroines) also contain recastings of Greek myth, using always the Latin names for the gods – ‘Jove’ or ‘Jupiter’ for Zeus, ‘Diana’ for Artemis, ‘Cupid’ or ‘Amor’ for Eros. and so on. Ovid is prolific, profuse, irreverent, saucy and cinematic in his energy and restless switching of points of view. It is clear from the wealth of references in his plays and poems that Shakespeare, amongst many other writers and artists, was hugely influenced by him. Ovid was happy to add, subtract and invent, and this has influenced and emboldened me to be – shall we say imaginative? – in some of my retellings too.

Sources Modern

Many children on both sides of the Atlantic grew up, as I did, on classic collections of the Greek myths by four enduringly popular Americans. Two were nineteenth-century writers: Nathaniel Hawthorne, who gave us A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys (1851) and its sequel, Tanglewood Tales (1853); and Thomas Bulfinch, whose The Age of Fable (1855), later incorporated into the compendious Bulfinch’s Mythology (1881), has run through dozens and dozens of editions in its 160 years of life. The twentieth century was dominated by the matchless Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942), which is still happily in print, and by Bernard Evslin’s evergreen Heroes, Gods and Monsters of the Greek Myths (1967). British equivalents include Charles Lamb’s The Adventures of Ulysses (1808) and L. S. Hyde’s Favourite Greek Myths (1905), this last being a great favourite of mine when I was a boy.

Estimable as all of these were, and still are, they tend shyly to skirt round or bowdlerize the erotic and violent episodes that form such an essential part of the Greek mythic world. The poet and novelist Robert Graves had no such compunctions, but his two eccentrically structured and narrated volumes of The Greek Myths (1955), while meticulous, scholarly and inspiring, chart a more literary and mythographical course – often with a view to highlighting his obsession with cults of a ‘white goddess’. The approaches of James Frazer and those who came after, including Joseph Campbell, valuable as they are, also have other, less specifically Greek and more academic, psychological, comparative and anthropological, fish to fry. Online these days there are plenty of sites devoted to helping the young ‘find’ Greek myth – though you may feel like a lie-down after reading those that describe Cadmus as ‘a homie’, Hermes as ‘cool’ and Hades as ‘a dude with issues’.

The one website I would most heartily recommend is theoi.com – a simply magnificent resource entirely dedicated to Greek myth. It is a Dutch and New Zealand project that contains over 1,500 pages of text and a gallery of 1,200 pictures comprising vase paintings, sculpture, mosaics and frescoes on Greek mythological themes. It offers thorough indexing, genealogies and subject headings. The bibliography is superb, and can lead one on a labyrinthine chase, hopping from source to source like an excited butterfly-collector.

Spelling the Names

Because many Greek myths and the characters in them come down to us by way of Latin writers, and because our alphabet is more Roman than Greek, the spelling of personalities and places can be rather hit and miss. I could have chosen only to offer Greek spellings, so that Kerberos, Iason and Kadmos are used instead of Cerberus, Jason and Cadmus. Should I have given ‘Cronus’ instead of Kronos? Maybe I ought to have favoured ‘Aktaion’ over Actaeon? ‘Narkissos’ seems bloody-minded when we all know Narcissus so well. In the end I’ve been inconsistent, but consistently so.

Saying the Names

My advice is to pronounce them in your head the way that seems most comfortable to you. The Greek letter kappa covers hard ‘k’ sounds, and the letter chi covers the more aspirated and guttural fricatives found in the ‘ch’ of ‘loch’ and ‘Bach’, though you are quite safe pronouncing all ‘ch’ instances as if they are standard ‘k’ sounds. The eta, or long Greek ‘e’, was sounded as ‘ee’ when I was taught ancient Greek at school – so the letter itself was pronounced ‘eater’. Nowadays it’s taught to rhyme with ‘waiter’. I get the sense that this modern pronunciation has entered American English more readily than British. Americans will tend to say ‘baiter’ for beta where we say ‘beater’, for example.