Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

It could be the route to great happiness, but as Euripides’s Medea famously declared: If her husband is happy in the marriage, a woman’s life is enviable. If not, it’s better to die.46

The romantic ideal of so many love songs, films, and novels is still one which is deeply questionable: the notion that persistence in the face of rejection is a signifier of profound love and not a disturbing refusal to hear the word no. And that is only compounded when the pursuer in the relationship is also the one with enormous power (or wealth, or vampiric tendencies, or all of the above. Vampires live forever, so they have terrific investment opportunities). Maybe if you just ask her enough times, or refuse to listen to her refusals, or kidnap her and take her to the Underworld, she’ll learn to love you the way you love her. Even when the man singing this tune has glittering eyes and razor cheekbones, I urge you to run rather than walk.

failed. And please, don’t tell me he loves her. If he loved her, he would want her to be happy, even if it meant losing her. Wanting to own someone isn’t love; it’s just possession.

Hermes is the perfect complement for Hestia.17 He is always travelling. He crosses boundaries between life and death (as we have seen, he can easily make a trip down to Hades and back), and he crosses the boundaries between mortal and immortal. A god who is always in motion is the opposite of Hestia, who is forever still at the centre of the house. And yet – as with so much in Hestia’s slight but beautiful story – this meeting of opposites doesn’t cause friction, like it does when Aphrodite clashes with Artemis, for example, over the fate of poor Hippolytus. Instead, we have the delightful image of a house-share sitcom, where opposites attract, but not in a sexual way. You feel they are only moments away from solving cosy crimes together, or doing a crossword. I have been racking my brains to think of another instance of male-female friendship like this anywhere in Greek myth. It’s a real struggle to think of even one.

The Furies reply as a group: We are the endless children of Night, known as Curses in our home beneath the ground . . . We drive murderers from their homes.

Be just willingly and without compulsion, they say, and you won’t be unhappy.20