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Greek mythology is filled with timeless stories about heroes slaying monsters, saving maidens, and meeting tragic fates. Just as Hercules and Achilles. Other than Atalanta, though, it’s rare to see a female character in a hero’s role in these tales. Atalanta herself loses agency in her own tale when she is tricked into marriage by Hippomenes.
Many other Greek myths go this way. Queer romances, like the one between Apollo and Hyacinth, end tragically. And in the long, long years of the Iliad‘s siege of Troy, how come we never really see much of what the women in Troy go through?
These retellings of ancient Greek mythology try to bridge the gap by shifting the spotlight to characters we rarely hear from in the myths.
1. The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
READ THE SILENCE OF THE GIRLS BY PAT BARKER
“Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles . . . How the epithets pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him ‘the butcher’.”
The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker
Briseis, the prize of Achilles, only gets a passing mention in the Illiad. While some scholars call her a significant character in the story, she doesn’t quite pass the Sexy Lamp Test which is a sister to the Bechdel Test. The basic idea is that if you can replace a female character in a story with a sexy lamp and it doesn’t change the plot, then that story has bad representation.
Briseis is a sexy lamp. Her only significance in the Iliad is that Achilles gets really pissed about Agamemnon taking her away from him because she was supposed to be his reward for sacking Lyrnessus.
But we don’t really get to know what she thinks and feels about everything that’s happened to her. In the context of the time, Briseis would have been a slave, and the men who own her and responsible for the death of her family members.
The Silence of the Girls puts us in Briseis’ head, fleshing out the cold, transactional views of the men around her regarding women in her position into the raw brutality that it really is.
2. Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
READ ARIADNE BY JENNIFER SAINT
“A fallen woman is the sweetest entertainment they know; I saw it before, in Crete. I will not let it happen to me.”
Ariadne by Jennifer Saint
Ariadne is one of the few heroines of Greek mythology to play an active role throughout her story. She starts off trapped in her parents’ palace in Crete together with her monstrous brother, the Minotaur. When Theseus arrives, she sees him as a ticket out but knows that he won’t make it out of the labyrinth alive without her help. She uses her wits to help him and she relies on his strength to get her out of the palace.
The real story comes after. Fans of the myths already know Theseus abandons Ariadne and she is later rescued by Dionysus, the god of wine. In Ariadne, Jennifer Saint gives her more control over her tale and depicts her as much, much more than a woman waiting for a savior.
3. Elektra by Jennifer Saint
READ ELEKTRA BY JENNIFER SAINT
“Crucially, in this telling, Agamemnon did nothing more than slaughter a simple animal. It’s poetic and pretty, and so very clean.
But I saw her body convulse in her father’s arms as he drew that blade across her throat.”
Elektra by Jennifer Saint
Elektra, the daughter of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, is a tragic heroine whose fate changes before she even appears in her own stories. When Agamemnon sacrifices one of her sisters, Iphigenia, to Artemis. Clytemenestra is furious and murders Agamemnon and Cassandra, a Trojan princess he had taken as a concubine, on his return, much to Elektra’s dismay.
While the original Elektra follows the titular character in her journey to getting revenge on her mother, this retelling of the play follows all three women — Elektra, Clytemnestra, and Cassandra — as they grapple with the effects of the Trojan war.
4. Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes
READ PANDORA’S JAR BY NATALIE HAYNES
“But the verb in Pandora’s name is active, not passive: literally she is all-giving rather than all-gifted.”
Pandora’s Jar by Natalie Haynes
Pandora’s Jar retells some of Greek mythology’s most impactful stories in a way that gives equal airtime to their key female characters. Among the most notable examples are the way she passes the mic to Jocasta, mother and later wife of Oedipus, and Medea, the spurned ex-wife of Jason who takes her revenge in an extreme way.
And speaking of Medea…
5. Medea By Euripides
“Of all creatures that can feel and think, we women are the worst treated things alive.”
Medea by Euripides
The original Medea was written as a play by someone who you may not expect such a thoughtful telling from. The playwright Euripides may be a man, but he has a track record for writing some of the most sympathetic stories about female figures in Greek mythology. This is most evident in Medea where Euripides seems to unflinchingly cast his sympathies entirely with Jason’s spurned wife. He even portrays the hero in a negative light — as the cold and distant man who showed himself to be to Medea behind closed doors.
Better still, Euripides shows Medea at her the worst of her mental states but still makes it clear how smart she is. Euripides even actively addresses the role most female characters are often written into in the myths, saying through her, “Let no one think me a weak one, feeble-spirited, a stay-at-home, but rather just the opposite, One who can hurt my enemies and help my friends; For the lives of such persons are most remembered.”
6. The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
READ THE SONG OF ACHILLES BY MADELINE MILLER
“What is admired in one generation is abhorred in another. We cannot say who will survive the holocaust of memory… We are men only, a brief flare of the torch.”
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller
In the unlikely event that you haven’t heard of The Song of Achilles, this novel is a retelling of the Iliad through the eyes of Patroclus, the “friend” of Achilles. Of course, they’re not actually friends. Miller digs into the context of the original story to point out how romantic the nature of the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus was.
Patroclus grapples with the restrictions of his relationship with Achilles as well as the restrictions the world has put on his lover. He knows him as gentle and kind by nature, even if he has a few anger issues, and questions the kind of society that would rather turn Achilles into a weapon than his own person.
7. The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
READ THE PENELOPIAD BY MARGARET ATWOOD
“What can a woman do when scandalous gossip travels the world? If she defends herself, she sounds guilty. So I waited some more.”
The Penelopiad by Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood’s Penelopiad has Penelope, wife of Oddyseus, look back on her mortal life and consider whether she was ever happy with its events. Th retrospective brings us back to the events leading up to her marriage to Odysseus and follows her through the stress of avoiding her violent tempered suitors leading up to the aftermath of Odysseus’ return.
