Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

I was most interested in the rebuttal of the idea that God made man in his image. Here was someone pointing out what seemed to me a much more plausible scenario: we create gods that reflect us and the way we see ourselves.

Not only did the ancient Greeks seem to have modelled gods in their mortal image, but they apparently chose their worst selves as the template.

Greek gods are capricious and destructive because they are connected with the natural world, which can often be the same – more so in prescientific times than now. When a bolt of lightning or an earthquake could destroy homes and families in an instant, when a famine or plague could devastate your agriculture and your livestock, you might struggle to believe in a benevolent deity.

Heroes need villains, though Greek gods were often capable of being both at once:

Female characters, though, are always presented through the prism of sexiness: Wonder Woman was as strong as Superman, but she also needed to have – in the words of her creator – the allure of a beautiful woman.

My point isn’t that men create deficient art, it’s that if we only have art created by men, we might want to bear that in mind when we respond to it. James Bond shows us who Ian Fleming (and, by extension, at least some of his readers) wanted to be; Pussy Galore just shows us who he wanted to bang.

Perhaps it’s a little reminder that the word museum means ‘home of the Muses’.

Reading might open our minds, but it doesn’t do much for our memories.

Comparatively few stories of the Muses survive from the ancient world, and they often show similar examples of instant and terrible revenge for hubristic bets and contests. The Sirens – who are the high watermark of destructively powerful song for us: siren song is a rare phrase that has leapt into regular language from myth – lose the very feathers from their wings when they propose and then fall short in a contest with the Muses.17 Not only do the Muses take the Sirens’ feathers, but they decorate themselves with them: a casual, ornamental triumphalism.

The Muses don’t come across as dangerously beautiful, but rather – as Hesiod presents them – as beautifully pretty, part of a gorgeous bucolic landscape. Their song doesn’t make men drown trying to hear more; it inspires them to create poetry of their own, to play and sing and compose. Their dancing doesn’t even make their feet rough, let alone result in any limb-tearing.

Though the Muses referred to by Pindar are ioplokamōn,21 they have hair the colour of violets, which does at least give them a pleasingly Gothic vibe.

Ceres begins searching for her stolen daughter and – who could have predicted it? – another nymph, Arethusa, offers help. She saw the frightened Proserpina being taken down to the Underworld to become its queen. With this information, Ceres can approach Jupiter, the king of the gods, and demand the return of her daughter. Jupiter is no help, preferring to define Pluto’s sustained sexual assault on Proserpina as an act of love.23 But Ceres refuses to give up, even when all seems lost. The compromise which Jupiter settles on – that Proserpina can return for only part of the year, which is why we have cold, dark months without her in winter – is the grudging response of male deities having to accommodate a goddess who will not give up.

Muses were well established in their different specialist fields. They have props to make this clear to the casual diner: Clio is holding a scroll to represent history, Terpsichore has a lyre in her hands, Erato strums a cithara. Thalia holds a grotesque comedy mask and Calliope bites on the end of her stylus, a writing tablet open in her left hand – even the great Muse of epic poetry needs a moment to think of the right word occasionally, perhaps. Euterpe has a pair of flutes, one in each hand; Melpomene gazes upward, a tragedy mask in her left hand. Ourania holds a beautiful glowing sphere to represent the heavens. Polymnia has sadly not survived to the present day.

The Muses have chosen to inspire scientists as well as artists.

Why wouldn’t you want your scientific pursuits to be beautiful? And why wouldn’t you apply forensic accuracy to your dance or song? The distinction that only sciences are useful and only arts are spirit-enhancing is a nonsensical one.

These Muses always remind me that scientists and artists should disregard the idiotic attempts to separate us. We are all nerds, in the end.

Sappho is like a Muse why, exactly? Because she is a glorious singer, composer, and performer, perhaps? Or is it just because she is female while doing those things and so were the Muses? The crucial point to note is that the eight other poets on the canonical list are all men. So is it a compliment that Sappho doesn’t belong there, because she belongs with the Muses, or is it a way of removing her from the conversation about who makes great art? Great poets must be male, because there they all are, proving it. The great female poet can be disregarded because she is basically inhuman, a goddess, and so doesn’t count. We don’t see Pindar being scooped off the list and counted in with Apollo.

We are so accustomed to viewing Hera through the lens of shrewish wife and implacable enemy. But here she seems young and vulnerable, thinking of Tethys, who took care of her when she was in need. An abusive father, a passive mother, a kindly foster mother and a seemingly less present foster father: it’s not wildly surprising that this woman might end up in an abusive marriage of her own.

Zeus is employing all his seductive zeal in the pursuit of Hera. She is not his first choice of partner, as Hesiod explains in the Theogony. First, the king of the gods sets his sights on Metis, mother of Athene.17 Then he marries Themis (the names are so similar, I always assume he chooses these wives for the increased chance of bluffing his way past saying the wrong name at a crucial moment); she gives birth to multiple children, including the Fates. Zeus fathers the Graces with Eurynome, then goes to the bed of Demeter, who gives birth to Persephone. And then, as seen in the previous chapter, he fathers the gold-crowned Muses with their mother Mnemosyne. Still short of a full set of Olympian gods, he impregnates Leto, who gives birth to Apollo and Artemis. And very last of all, notes Hesiod,18 he makes Hera his wife, and she produces Hebe (the goddess of youth), Ares (the god of war), and Eileithyia (a goddess of childbirth). No wonder Hera displays so many signs of jealousy and insecurity.

Perhaps she recognized that she was never first in his mind, just one in a series of conquests to create mothers of his divine offspring.

Who Elon Musk aspires to?😂😂

She is performing a sort of divine diplomacy, forging alliances to ensure that the Greeks do indeed win the war they are fated to win. We sometimes overlook this, focusing instead on her unquenchable animus against the Trojans.

If Hera is at large, you can behave as badly as you like, and someone will probably blame her instead.

The more time you spend examining these stories of Hera’s bad behaviour, the more reasons you tend to be able to find for why she might be behaving unreasonably, or why someone else is the guilty party but blaming Hera is so convenient.

the real problem in any bad family dynamic isn’t the irascible, lecherous patriarch, but his patience-sapped wife.

Ixion has offended the rules of xenia – guest-friendship – by inviting a man to his house and murdering him. But he is then offered the highest form of xenia from the king of the gods himself.

it is hard to imagine a worse response a husband could give to his assaulted wife than to suggest he needs to check whether a murderer is also capable of being a rapist, or whether she’s just making it up.

But Hera is stuck with Zeus for eternity, unless he boots her out and replaces her with a younger model. And then where would she be? A footnote in mythography, like her predecessors? Her status depends on her husband – whose wandering eye is of literally mythical proportions – retaining his interest in her. No wonder she’s intolerant. I’m starting to feel insecure just writing about her, and I don’t even have a husband.

The Juno spacecraft spent five years flying to – of course – the mysterious planet Jupiter, to try and discover more about it. In their press release, NASA made the connection explicit: ‘The god Jupiter drew a veil of clouds around himself to hide his mischief, and his wife, the goddess Juno, was able to peer through the clouds and reveal Jupiter’s true nature.’47 Appropriately enough, as she journeyed through space, Juno caught sight of Io and Europa, moons named after two of the many young women Jupiter assaulted. So even in her most distant, futuristic iteration, Juno is forever in pursuit of Jupiter, still searching for his infidelities, still finding them.

Her right hand is held in the characteristic pose, in front of her pubic triangle. This pose has been called the Venus Pudica, which tends to be translated as ‘Modest Venus’.

But the word pudica means something rather uglier than ‘modest’, with connotations of shame or disgrace. It is a source of ongoing irritation to me that the words we use to describe female genitalia become more misogynistic the more apparently neutral they are: pudenda, something to be ashamed of; vagina, a sheath for holding a sword. It makes me long for some brisk monosyllables.

Having castrated his father, Kronos throws the disembodied parts into the sea. They are carried by the surging waves for a long time, Hesiod remarks.8 The spume coalesces around the sperm (sometimes I write these sentences just to see if my editor still has a red pen), and Aphrodite forms from this frothing white aftermath of violence. This is why men call her Aphrodite, Hesiod adds: because she is aphrogenea,9 born from the foam.

So perhaps the moral of this story is that if a goddess tells you to keep your mouth shut on pain of meteorological revenge, you should.

You may be wondering what possible wrong Niobe could have committed to warrant such a horrific punishment. Homer has Achilles remind Priam of the story in the final book of the Iliad. In this telling, Niobe has twelve children (later sources will agree on fourteen). Proud of her fecundity, Niobe describes herself as the equal of fair-cheeked Leto, goddess and mother of Apollo and Artemis.1 And because of this vain and foolish boast, all her children are slaughtered by Leto’s furious offspring.

There is no more difficult goddess to pin down than Artemis. Partly, this is because her name was attached to goddesses across the Greek world with whom she shared one or more characteristics. This sometimes led to a merging of the two deities, a process known as syncretism, meaning that the characteristics of multiple goddesses were folded into one character.

She is the queen of wild animals, but she also hunts and kills them. She is the protector of young girls, but she sometimes demands them as sacrifices. She is the sister (often twin) to Apollo but sometimes they are born on completely different islands. She can heal mortals but she can also cause sudden, otherwise inexplicable deaths.

Greeks will sometimes combine her with Selene, the moon goddess (her brother is similarly connected to the sun) or Eileithyia, a goddess of childbirth. Acquiring expertise in this field is no mean feat for a virgin.

The word korē – meaning ‘maiden’ or ‘girl’

The apparently civilized Greeks have identical values to the barbarians whose customs so appal Iphigenia.

When Artemis was still a child, her father, Zeus, asked her what she wanted. The goddess had only one request: Give me the moon.

The country is a futuristic alternative America, with a toxic power imbalance. It is called Panem, in case anyone was in any doubt of the nod to imperial Rome. The Roman people, as the satirist Juvenal once complained, sold their votes for panem et circenses – bread and the circuses.

31 The bread Juvenal is referring to is a grain dole, handed out to voters, who were adult male citizens of Rome. Women couldn’t vote, so they had nothing to sell for grain; they needed a man in the family to qualify. This is essentially the condition in which Katniss finds herself growing up. Her father is dead, her mother paralysed with shock and grief. In order to keep her remaining family alive, Katniss must become the hunter-gatherer they need. There are times when she is so close to failure that only charity from the boy who works at the nearby bakery prevents their starvation.

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.

Nothing has perplexed me more, in exploring Artemis worship across the ancient Greek world, than the apparent contradiction between her connection to animals and girls and her remorseless taking of their lives. It took a conversation with a travel writer to remind me that I was looking at things from a modern, European perspective, and a vegetarian one at that.

I have only lived in a time and place where human damage to the animal kingdom – the vast extinctions that have occurred because of us – have been undeniable.

My travel-writing friend has no problem with the notion of someone loving an animal they will hunt and kill. I have had to rethink my position and accept that it is not a universal response to seeing a lion or a bear, believing that it is in need of protection from you. For most people throughout history, the opposite would have been true. Especially with regard to the bear, since they can climb trees.

you can call no man happy until he’s dead.

My favourite by far is Pamphagus – eats everything. Others are compared to winds, mountains, and monsters: Harpy is a great name for a dog. The fast ones are given wings, the noisy ones named for their barks and howls. The list goes on for twenty lines: it is a huge pack of dogs, well over thirty.

No matter how many different aspects of Artemis we examine, it all comes back to this. She is a true predator.

It begins with a brief precis: Demeter of the lovely hair has her slender-ankled daughter snatched by Aidoneus (a poetic variation of Hades), and Zeus gave her to him.1 That these three deities are siblings, so that it is Demeter’s brothers who are conspiring to kidnap her child, goes unmentioned. So does Persephone’s name, although her youth is referenced obliquely because she is paidzousan – playing like a child – with the daughters of Oceanus. The scene is all bucolic innocence: girls picking flowers in a field together. But even the earth is in on Zeus’s deception. Gaia – the earth goddess – causes a huge blossoming of narcissus flowers to act as bait for Persephone. She is still unnamed, but here called kalukopidi – the girl with a face as beautiful as a flower.

Demeter is the goddess of grain, of agriculture. In other words, she specializes in the plants which feed hungry mortals.