Ever since spending a year on a Fulbright teaching grant on the island of Cyprus, where Aphrodite arose from the seafoam, I’ve been enticed by the Greek mythic world, a fascination that began much earlier with reading Edith Hamilton’s Mythology. Subsequent trips to Greek islands, museums, and archeological sites enhanced those ancient resonances, as did Mother Goddess studies and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Recent writing residencies at Cyprus College of Art and on Evia island immersed me in the Greek atmosphere and mythos as I edited Serpent Visions. My career was spent as a community college teacher, where my courses included ‘World Literature, Homer to Dante,’ and Shakespeare, another keen interest.
Graves develops the characters and plot in this book fictionally, but he believes Homer’s Odyssey was written by a character in the epic, Nausicaa, princess of Sicily, as he argues in his historical note.
It’s a lively and adventurous story, and Graves’ conviction that a woman authored this work attributed to Homer adds to its charm. Later mythic retellings are based on the stories they spring from, but Graves sheds new light on the Odyssey itself through Nausicaa’s point of view.
His nonfiction works, The Greek Myths and The White Goddess, are also brilliant, original approaches to mythology and highly recommended.
In Homer's Daughter Robert Graves recreates the Odyssey. This bold retelling of the ancient epic imagines that its author was not the blind and bearded Homer of legend, but a young woman in Western Sicily who calls herself Nausicaa. In Robert Graves's words, Homer's Daughter is 'the story of a high-spirited and religious-minded Sicilian girl who saves her father's throne from usurpation, herself from a distasteful marriage, and her two younger brothers from butchery by boldly making things happen, instead of sitting still and hoping for the best.'
Although this is not Mary Renault’s first novel set in Bronze Age Greece, it’s a classic.
She retells the story of Theseus in his own words, but not as a simple hero tale. Set long before the Trojan War, much takes place in Minoan Crete where Theseus performs his first heroic act.
Renault depicts the advanced Minoan culture and Mother Goddess religion intriguingly and gives fresh interpretations, from the character of Theseus himself to the Minotaur in the Labyrinth and what follows.
First read while I was a college student (not for a class), this book inspired me to one day create my own mythic retelling.
Theseus is the grandson of the King of Troizen, but his paternity is shrouded in mystery - can he really be the son of the god Poseidon? When he discovers his father's sword beneath a rock, his mother must reveal his true identity: Theseus is the son of Aegeus, King of Athens, and is his only heir. So begins Theseus's perilous journey to his father's palace to claim his birth right, escaping bandits and ritual king sacrifice in Eleusis, to slaying the Minotaur in Crete. Renault reimagines the Theseus myth, creating an original, exciting story.
Elsie has two feet in the 20th century. Smith has one foot in the 19th. Their marriage, founded on physical attraction, is built on sand as all around them the earth of Europe also starts to quake. Prised apart by emotional conflict and the loss of two children they are…
It’s a beautifully written story of Achilles and Priam, expanding upon the last book of Homer’s Iliad.
Malouf looks at warfare and heroism from inside the warrior’s complicated reality, with fatherhood woven through. Each relationship is powerful: Achilles and Patroclus, Achilles and Hector, Hector and his parents, Priam and Hecuba, Priam and the carter who transports him to Achilles’ camp with his ransom to exchange for the body of his son Hector, and in the end, Achilles and Priam in heartbreaking intimacy.
This novel arouses profound emotions, often surprising, and the details are vividly imagined. Malouf gives us much to reflect on with his retelling of this archetypal yet very personal tale.
In his first novel in more than a decade, award-winning author David Malouf reimagines the pivotal narrative of Homer’s Iliad—one of the most famous passages in all of literature.
This is the story of the relationship between two grieving men at war: fierce Achilles, who has lost his beloved Patroclus in the siege of Troy; and woeful Priam, whose son Hector killed Patroclus and was in turn savaged by Achilles. A moving tale of suffering, sorrow, and redemption, Ransom is incandescent in its delicate and powerful lyricism and its unstated imperative that we imagine our lives in the glow of…
The ‘girls’ are the Trojan women, voiceless in Homer’s Iliad except, briefly, Andromache, Cassandra, and Hecuba.
Women drive the plot, from Helen, the Spartan queen abducted by the Trojan prince Paris, who is blamed for starting it, to Briseis, the Trojan captive Agamemnon takes from Achilles, but they say little.
Most of the chapters in Silence of the Girls are first-person in Briseis’ voice, with interspersed third-person chapters focusing on Achilles and Patroclus. We see the war from a broad, realistic perspective, but the tragedy in the center is of the women—as the Greek playwright Euripides recognizes in his play ‘The Trojan Women’ among others.
Pat Barker gives us the full, moving story in this novel and its sequels, The Women of Troy and The Voyage Home.
'Magnificent. You are in the hands of a writer at the height of her powers' Evening Standard
There was a woman at the heart of the Trojan War whose voice has been silent - until now. Discover the greatest Greek myth of all - retold by the witness that history forgot . . .
Briseis was a queen until her city was destroyed. Now she is a slave to the man who butchered her husband and brothers. Trapped in a world defined by men, can she survive…
To Do Justice is the first book in the White Winter Trilogy. The other books are To Love Kindness and To Walk Humbly. The Trilogy follows the same set of characters through eight tumultuous years in their lives and in the history of the world. To Do Justice starts…
Unlike any of the other protagonists in this chronological list, Circe is a goddess—and a unique one. Because of her powers of witchcraft, Zeus exiles her from Mount Olympus, and this novel explores her adventures and emotions on her island of Aiaia and, briefly, in Crete.
The popularity of this book stems in large part from its unique angle not only on Circe but on Greek gods and stories, from Hermes and Daedalus to Jason and Medea—and the most familiar to land on her island: Odysseus on his homeward journey from Troy.
Miller freely draws on varied sources, but to me the most powerful story is in the final chapters, focusing on Telegonus, her son by Odysseus, and Penelope and Telemachus. These originate more in her imagination than any mythic source, yet they ring true.
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. Circe is a strange child - not powerful and terrible, like her father, nor gorgeous and mercenary like her mother. Scorned and rejected, Circe grows up in the shadows, at home in neither the world of gods or mortals. But Circe has a dark power of her own: witchcraft. When her gift threatens…
Set in Bronze Age Greece, 'Serpent Visions' depicts the enigmatic history of the gender-switching seer Teiresias who changes sexes twice after striking apart coupling serpents. Near death, Teiresias recounts his long-secret adventures as a woman and later as the soothsayer involved with Oedipus and his descendants to his daughter Manto so she will keep his story alive. A character unique to mythology, Teiresias lives in a time where the gods involved themselves in mortal's lives. Zeus and Hera, king and queen of the gods, summon him to settle their nectar-fueled argument, who enjoys sex more, man or woman. His reply, 'Woman,' inspired this book. What in those seven years as woman inspired that reply?
Dolça Llull Prat, a wealthy Barcelona woman, is only 15 when she falls in love with an impoverished poet-solder. Theirs is a forbidden relationship, one that overcomes many obstacles until the fledgling writer renders her as the lowly Dulcinea in his bestseller.
We know the Greek gods from mythology, and assume their stories ended there. They did not. This is a compelling new story about the Olympic gods in our century. True to form, they continue to challenge our modern morality. Now they appear to prevent humans from discovering immortality.
