Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

Throughout the Games, Katniss never forgets the inhumanity of all the adults who are collaborating to kill innocent children. In this, we might note that she resembles not Artemis but Euripides’s Iphigenia, who becomes her priestess. Katniss and Iphigenia both despise their current circumstances while fondly remembering a more innocent and kindly homeland. Yet as we saw above, Iphigenia’s beloved Greeks were just as capable of human sacrifice as the Taurians. And though Katniss is undergoing this horrific ordeal because of the ruling president and his cronies in the Capitol, she was only saved from desperate hunger in her own district by the kindness of another child, one she didn’t even know. We might well wonder where the adults were who could have shared some of their own meagre rations with two small children. Even the good people of District 12 would apparently have watched Katniss and Prim starve to death. So the parallels continue: no matter where you are in futuristic Panem, or in Iphigenia’s Bronze Age home, you are not protected by those who surely should protect you.