Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

Gaia – from an earlier generation of gods – is mother to giants and Titans, but shows little interest in the fate of human beings.

Iliad, Gaia and Zeus decide that there are too many mortals and set events in motion to cause the Trojan War.

Persephone is drawn to this miraculous bouquet: a hundred flowers bloom from a single root. But as she draws closer, the earth splits open and the many-named son of Kronos (that’s Hades again, at the risk of contradicting his epithet) drives his immortal horses at her.3 He snatches Persephone against her will – aekousan – and she screams as he carries her away. She shrieks, calls out for her father, the best and loftiest son of Kronos. But no mortal or immortal heard her voice.

Persephone is now little more than a ghost, haunting the realm of the dead.5

scene: a very young woman trying to escape the clutches of an older, much stronger man.

The jokes which reach us when we’re in the bottom of a dark pit, the ones that make us give a reluctant half smile at the absurdity of it all, even as we’re struggling to climb back up to normality? Those are the ones we need. It is these jokes – delivered by friends or strangers who may have no idea of the torment we’re enduring – these ones that put solid ground beneath our feet and carry us back to who we are, and were, before we landed in the pit.

No wonder they were all drawn to this particular myth, in which a woman wins a partial reprieve for her trafficked daughter by simply refusing to do what so many women are expected to do and tolerate the abuse of powerful men.

THERE COMES a time in every author’s life when she has to accept she may not have made the absolute best possible decision. And the day when I blithely promised ten thousand words on a goddess who is barely mentioned in any ancient source, who makes no dent on the Renaissance, who has inspired virtually no classical composers, no modern artists, nor even any philhellenic sci-fi writers to create work inspired by her? That may turn out to have been just such a time.

According to Hesiod’s Theogony, Rhea gives birth to the following children in this order: Hestia, Demeter, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, and Zeus.2 Kronos swallows each of the first five deities, and Rhea is understandably consumed with grief. She consults her parents – Gaia and Ouranos, Earth and Heaven. They tell her to go to Crete to give birth to Zeus, the youngest of her children.3 Rhea gives birth and then plays a trick on Kronos: instead of giving him their youngest child to consume, she gives him a rock, disguised as a baby. The inability to even register the difference between a god and a rock suggests Kronos was not just a terrible father, but also an inattentive eater. He vomits up the stone and then his older children. If Zeus is the youngest of these gods – as Hesiod clearly states – then Hestia must be the eldest.

If you have ever come home and found warmth – literal or metaphorical – you have had an encounter with the goddess Hestia. In other words, every ancient Greek home contained a shrine to Hestia: if you lit a fire, cooked food, burned a sacrificial offering to any god or goddess, you were using her name, recognizing her divinity.

someone describes something as ‘women’s work’. They never seem to mean ‘work that can only be done by women because of the skills they possess’. They tend to mean something arduous and boring that they wouldn’t choose to do, decorated with a patina of gender stereotypes.

The life of a Vestal may seem restrictive and miserable to us, but they were treated with enormous respect, and it was in some ways preferable to the lives of other high-status Roman girls, who would be married off aged fifteen or so, often to a man who was a great deal older. Vestals had a role in public life when women were largely excluded from this realm

Augustus granted rights to Vestals that he otherwise extended only to mothers of three children, who were given special honours for their commitment to the Roman populace.

This is weirdly relevant given that Trump wants to give credits to women who pop out more babies….

It’s fascinating that fully half of these six major goddesses have sworn off sex and marriage, given that they were worshipped during times when ordinary women had little choice about marriage, and almost no opportunity to reject it as a way of life.

Perhaps the only thing we can read into this mismatch is that gods occupy a different plane from mortals and so would live unimaginable lives, and that being unmarried is as natural for a goddess (and unnatural for a mortal) as living atop Mount Olympus or being born from the foaming sea. But I can’t help wondering if there is some sort of recognition for the idea that female gods – who held power and autonomy that female humans were not permitted to have – might well not want a male partner.

Artemis lives an independent, almost feral existence away from cities and their societal norms, so her aversion to marriage is in keeping with the unbounded life she has chosen. Hestia – on the other hand – is right in the heart of city and society, yet she seems to prefer companionship to desire, a longer-term kind of domesticity. And Athene is different again. To return to the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, she is the daughter of Zeus who bears the aegis, glaukōpis Athene, who takes no pleasure in the works of Aphrodite. It’s wars that delight her, the work of Ares: battles, fighting, and making gleaming works herself.12

is one of the quirks of Greek mythology that one artwork or text routinely contradicts another.

He will not return until the end of the play, after Ajax has taken his own life with his sword: a great warrior finally turning his weapon upon himself. It is worth pointing out that since 2001, roughly four times as many members of the US armed forces have died by suicide than in military operations.39 The causes are complex, but a report for Brown University’s Costs of War project suggests that the trauma of conflict and crisis of conscience are two important elements.

retains such a hold on us today, and I always give the same answer: because the unit of currency in tragedy is a human being. No matter what else has changed across thousands of years, I think that remains true.

Ancient societies have some constants which horrify us, like the total acceptance of slavery. Very few ancient writers or thinkers questioned it; most assumed it was the natural order of things. And yet – though in the abstract slavery was considered natural for some people – no one wanted to be a slave, and even slaves might cling to a status that marks them out as essentially unslavish.

same thing is true of sexual assault. Just because it happens all the time doesn’t mean someone doesn’t mind it happening specifically to them: quite the reverse, in fact.

Erinyes – one of several names by which the Furies are known in Greek

They loosely resemble Gorgons, at least insofar as both creatures are connected with snakes. Gorgons are usually depicted with these snakes growing from their scalps like hair, whereas the Furies are often depicted with snakes coiling through their hair and around their arms. But the eyes dripping blood, the malevolent dancing, the certainty of the one to whom they are visible that he must move and keep moving? These are qualities we only associate with the Furies. There is something spectacularly nasty about the idea that they sing and dance in Aeschylus’s version. They’re like the dark sisters of the Muses, taking pleasure in punishing wrongdoers.

these pursuers are hideous, terrifying, and visible only to the one they are here to punish is an influential one. It is the stuff of nightmares: We run, but they keep gaining on us. We look back, but we haven’t lost them. We try to hide, but they always find us. And worst of all is the isolation we experience because no one else can see the creatures that will never, ever leave us alone until we die.

In the past, the time the Furies represent, people were expected to obey laws because those laws were immutable and unarguable. Most societies agree that it is wrong, unnatural even, to kill a parent. And there is a universality to some beliefs that exceed other, more culturally specific ones. The Furies are advancing similar values to those we find across other ancient societies, as we can see in the Hebrew Bible: honour your father and mother; don’t commit murder. And these are values we expect to see in place in modern societies too. We might think of them as natural laws, in contrast to less-universal ones, which we usually think of as customs or mores. So we might expect laws around marriage to be specific to one country’s legal system – deciding who you can marry, and where, and from what age. These might change as society changes, as has happened with equal marriage legislation, for example.

Societies struggle to thrive unless a majority of individuals subscribe to the same values. And while customs can and should change, some values – those the Furies defend – are less adjustable. Most of us agree – and have agreed for millennia – that not killing our parents is the right course of action, and that this is the kind of society that we (and perhaps more pertinently, our parents) want.

We are better off living in a world in which murderers are tried by a jury than deemed impure and driven to suicide. Divine embodiments of curses called down by the victims of unspeakable crimes offer a kind of justice, but in its bluntest, blindest sense. The survivors of a murdered relative will always be angry and distraught at what they have lost, and how; expecting them to administer justice – rather than vengeance – is not a reasonable request.

Once again, very relevant for current events- the idea of justice vs vengeance and due process is being eroded in the US.

They deserve us to lift that particular burden from them, and do so within a framework of just laws. We can complain about the times juries decide cases in a way we believe is wrong, but this is what came before that.

now calls them euphronas – the kind ones.30 And so this is how the terrifying creatures called the Erinyes acquire a new reputation for kindness, which gives this play its title: Eumenides, or Kindly Ones.

They serve a crucial role in society before the creation of formalized legal proceedings for ensuring that people maintained a civilized moral code. Sometimes that was as basic as not committing murder, but it was also a way of protecting oaths and promises in a time before mass literacy.

Just because there is no paperwork to prove it doesn’t mean that we can – or should – all just forget what was said in the past. We live in a time when it is commonplace to see a politician reverse their position and then simply deny they ever said anything that contradicts their current position. It is a particularly egregious form of lying because it leaves the listener not only uncertain of the truth now, but unsure of whether they had ever grasped it. It’s bad enough to be a liar; it is worse to try to persuade people that their memories or understanding are at fault. And although we do now have recorded evidence of their former assertions and their sudden switches in stance, it doesn’t always have the effect it once did. Primarily, I think, because too many people have been emboldened to simply lie and keep lying, to deny the truth, to deny the past, to deny the collective memory of those they are supposed to serve. And so I find myself thinking that of all the goddesses in this book, the Furies – not in their role of vengeance goddesses but in the sense of collective, societal shame that they also personify, shame at breaking your word or behaving cruelly and dishonestly – might be the ones I would most like to see restored to a modern pantheon.