About Greek Mythology

 
‘We recognise it in this very primal way’: Stephen Fry, Brie Larson, Chris Ofili and more on why we can’t get enough of Greek mythology
 

Greek myth is not a stable thing. There is no such thing as a canonical, “original” version of a Greek myth. The stories that remain to us – the material of classical plays and poetry, and of visual culture from pottery to pediments – are already elaborations and accretions. In the ancient Greek and Roman world, stories were adapted and remade to serve the needs of the moment. The Greek tragedians often took the germ of an idea from the Homeric epics, and built an entire plot from it. Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, for instance, is in dialogue with Homer’s Odyssey: both are stories of a warrior’s return from war, but with entirely different outcomes. Euripides’s subversive play Helen proposes that the entire Trojan war was fought not in the cause of a real woman, but of an illusory, fake version sent by the gods, while the “real” Helen of Troy sat out the siege in Egypt.
 
Seen in this light, as novelist Pat Barker points out below, the modern appetite for working with (and maybe sometimes against) Greek myth is a part of a long continuum, rather than an innovation. Sometimes stories retold in the modern, or early modern, era have taken remarkably circuitous routes: Barker’s choice, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a love story from the Trojan war, came to the playwright not directly from a classical source, but indirectly through a winding lineage including Chaucer and Boccaccio that substantially transforms the story in the process. The artist Chris Ofili, who illustrated my book Greek Myths: A New Retelling, is one of the most mesmerising “retellers” of classical mythology. His deep artistic engagement with this world of stories began for him with Ovid’s epic poem about mythical transformations, Metamorphoses, more than a decade ago. Emily Wilson’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey has also been important for him. But his paintings and drawings are, at the same time, deeply personal, infused with the landscapes and stories of the Caribbean, where he lives and works. Greek myths can travel endlessly through cultures, time and space. Kamila Shamsie’s novel Home Fire, set in modern Britain, Islamic State-controlled Syria and Pakistan, is a reworking of Sophocles’s tragedy, Antigone. Constantine Cavafy – the great Greek poet who lived in Alexandria, Liverpool and Constantinople – infused Homer with his restless spirit in his great poem Ithaka.
 
The story of Orpheus and Eurydice – which had its richest ancient telling in Ovid’s Metamorphoses – seems to be a never-failing power source for artists, including Anaïs Mitchell, who used it in her score and book for the musical Hadestown, and who offers her own favourite classical reworking below. For Brie Larson, the Orpheus story has found intriguing expression in the work of Baz Luhrmann: it is the riptide that flows beneath his film, Moulin Rouge! The poet Alice Oswald has also selected a work of performance and storytelling based on the Orpheus myth, Ben Haggarty’s Orpheus Dismembered. Oswald’s poem Memorial is one of my most treasured retellings of Greek myth. It is a radical stripping-back of Homer’s Iliad, in which almost all the material is removed except for the killing, on the battlefield, of its characters. The resulting work is a spare, monumental parade of the war dead, cut through with her versions of some of Homer’s remarkable extended similes, which reach out beyond the combat zone to the natural world.
 
Writer Daniel Mendelsohn has pointed to a novel that I also love: Mary Renault’s 1958 book, The King Must Die, a brilliant retelling of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, and proof that novelists have been working closely with mythical material well before the current generation of writers such as Madeline Miller and Barker. The King Must Die is also an important intertext for Rick Riordan’s recommendation: Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games, which plays with the Theseus myth refracted through Collins’s reading of Renault’s novel. Collins’s setting for her YA trilogy – a decadent, careless, wealthy “court” that enjoys the spectacle of young people fighting to the death – has a recognisable precursor in Renault’s imagined court of Knossos. Riordan’s own myth-inspired novels, the Percy Jackson series, for younger children, are an utter joy. I gave them all to my nieces when they were young, having read them cover-to-cover myself first – purely for quality-control purposes, of course.
 
The question, so often, is why artists want to keep working with classical myth. It is partly because of that endless malleability: they are living stories, limber and flexible but also tough and durable, a wonderful material to work with. It’s partly, too, because of what they deal with: love, death, heartbreak, reversals of fortune, grief, hatred, revenge, lust for power, desire – the human fundamentals at their most raw, their most bitter, and their most beautiful.
 
Charlotte Higgins
 
SOURCE: MSN