Helen of Troy, Aphrodite, Medea ... putting women centre stage in an enjoyable, witty look at the ways in which their stories have been changed over time It was actually a Roman mythological figure that compelled Natalie Haynes, author of the Women’s prize-shortlisted _A Thousand Ships_, to make female characters in the Greek myths the subject of her new work of nonfiction. Dido, ruler of a nascent north African nation, was the queen with whom Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic poem the _Aeneid_, fell in love – before abandoning her to seek his destiny in Italy. Dido is a supremely sympathetic literary figure: dignified, humane, tragic. As she explains in her introduction to _Pandora’s Jar_, Haynes was saying so on the radio when she was surprised to hear her interviewer describing the character as “a vicious schemer”, a version of Dido, it turned out, that was not Virgil’s, but Christopher Marlowe’s. The modern era, or at least the early modern era, had not served Dido well. Part of the project of this hugely lively, fun, yet serious book is to unpeel the accretions that have affixed themselves over time, like barnacles on a shipwreck, to the women of Greek myth, from Pandora to Helen of Troy via Phaedra and Medea. Haynes examines the original sources for the characters, noting how, often – though far from invariably – later incarnations have underplayed the much fuller, more complex roles given to them in antiquity. Continue reading...
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