Divine Might: Goddesses in Greek Myth

by Natalie Haynes

IF OXEN and lions and horses had hands like men, and could draw and make works of art, horses would draw gods like horses, and oxen like oxen, and each would draw pictures of the gods as if they had bodies like their own.

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.

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.

So this is my answer to that question prompted by Xenophanes. When women make art like men do, their goddesses look divine.

The Muses face us. We don’t know it yet, but later we’ll realize that they are Calliope, Muse of epic poetry; Clio, Muse of history; Thalia, Muse of comedy; Terpsichore, Muse of dance; Melpomene, Muse of tragedy. Clio holds a scroll to represent history, and Melpomene carries a tragedy mask. They may not be the first thing we see when we look at the vase, but they’re soon the only thing. Perhaps it’s a little reminder that the word museum means ‘home of the Muses’. They own this space, and we are their audience.

Hesiod mentions their soft skin twice: when he describes them bathing, and specifically their feet when they dance. Expectations of feminine corporeal softness have existed for as long as women have been in stories, it seems: do not imagine these barefoot dancing Muses have rough skin anywhere, even on their heels. I half expect them to start advertising moisturizer at this point.

The more times I read this opening to the Theogony, the more I like it, from the mock humility to the assurance of authenticity. And I think this might be my favourite part of it. We just won’t know, according to Hesiod’s Muses, if they’re telling us the truth or not. It’ll sound the same to us, and they’ve just confessed that they sometimes lie. They have removed certainty from this account while appearing to bestow it, and they have admitted it right at the start. I find myself wondering whether if all ancient texts on the origins of gods had come with the same disclaimer, we might have had to work a bit harder to find things to fight wars over.

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

Poets need Muses or they can’t compose anything. As Homer says in the Iliad,9 these goddesses are always present and know everything. No poet could hope to have witnessed all these events that span across vast reaches of time and space, mortal and immortal worlds. So if the Muses don’t share things with him, he won’t have a story at all.

So if we were trying to describe the Muses in contrast to these other characters, we might think of them as constructively beautiful, rather than destructively so. They make us better by their existence. Because they have songs and dancing and musical talent, so might we if we ask them very politely at the beginning of our creative endeavour. But some people cannot see such generosity without wanting to possess it like Thamyris, defile it like Pyreneus, or overthrow it like the daughters of Pierus. And it is when threatened – in either their bodily integrity or their reputation – that the Muses snap and take their revenge.

The women laugh at this Muse and scorn her threatening words. And as they laugh, their skin grows feathers, their faces form beaks, and their arms become wings. There’s nothing to stop you picking a fight with the Muses, but you may find yourself changed into a magpie if you do.

If you want to show the Muses proper respect, it’s pretty clear that you shouldn’t challenge them to any sort of musical duel.

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

By the twentieth century, Muses have had their creativity clipped away altogether. Poets, artists, and musicians still have muses, but the role is largely to be pretty and make a man creative.

So let us return to the subject of these goddesses from ancient myth, rather than their modern namesakes with no power and terrible taste in men. When they leave Mount Helicon, where do Muses end up?

Beautiful, jealous, destructive, comical: the peacock was the perfect match for Hera, the goddess everyone loves to hate. Before we go any further, I should explain that I do not love to hate her. I genuinely like her, and I am not just saying that because I don’t want her to turn me into a cow, or persecute me with snakes, or madden me with a gadfly until I kill my dearest loves.

It is a constant theme in the Metamorphoses that someone who loses their voice loses their power.

There really is nothing like Greek myth for reminding us that the countryside is rarely the blissful idyll for young women that it is for young men and gods. More frequently it is the source of sexual threat and constant anxiety.

I have some sympathy with Pausanias here, since I too have been perplexed by Zeus’s habit of converting himself into a bird for the purposes of impressing or beguiling women.

no one receives a more sustained campaign of Hera’s rage than the son of Alcmene and infant scourge of snakes, Heracles. Indeed, she begins this persecution before he is even born, as Ovid relates the story.

In the most notorious version of the myth, as told by Pseudo-Apollodorus,36 Hera drives Heracles mad, so much so that he murders his wife Megara and their children (I can’t apologize enough if you only know this character from the Disney movie and I have just broken your heart. It kills me too, for what it’s worth).

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. It is a misogynist narrative as old as time itself, and never out of fashion:

We like to be able to separate heroes, villains, and victims. It’s convenient for a simple narrative, but it isn’t always reflective of the truth.

You would want Hera to defend you, and you would want your enemies to be hers.

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.

Human propensity to be helpless in the face of desire is widely attested, and largely unchanged through time: love poetry is one of the oldest literary forms there is. But the way we view the causes of lust has changed.

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.

Hermes replies, yes. In fact, he would run the risk of being bound three times as tightly to have sex with golden Aphrodite. I have sometimes wondered if the prospect of being tied up in golden chains actually adds to the appeal as far as Hermes is concerned: he seems so quick to reply and to raise the question of more and tighter restraints. But I accept this isn’t a very scholarly response to the text.

This moment, I think, reveals the heart of Aphrodite’s power. No matter what the situation, no matter how humiliated or shamed she is supposed to feel according to the men around her, she is restored to her usual smiling serene beauty in the blink of an eye.

Perhaps this is key to all these deities: they are unchanging, after all, because they are immortal. But there is something about Aphrodite that reminds me of women applying their lipstick in a war zone – you can’t take away her game face. Or certainly not for long. Make her fall in love with a mortal man and she will disguise herself, seduce him, threaten him, and leave him. Make her your laughingstock and she will only make you want her more.

The Latin here reads fuge coniugis usum – flee the use of a husband – which I may yet have as a tattoo.

the race begins. Atalanta is easily the better runner: Hippomenes is breathless and dry-mouthed, but she holds back, delaying when she could have passed him. Luckily, the time when women repress their abilities to avoid making a man feel bad about himself is long gone.

So avoid lions at all costs, Venus tells Adonis. Actually, avoid all creatures that like a fight. Don’t let your bravery destroy us both. This is obviously a perfectly reasonable moral to draw from the tale, although I have tended to prioritize the more subtextual moral (don’t pretend to be less than you are to make a mediocre man feel better, as you will both regret it when you have tails).

This is a side to Venus that we have seen elsewhere and can never be overlooked: her favour is both conditional and temporary. And when it is withdrawn, the penalty can be devastating.

When Pausanias is visiting the area, he observes a bear and some other animals making a run for it, like creatures from a beleaguered ark trying to escape a pyromaniac Noah.

It is quite something to the modern ear to hear a man complain that his brother is pathetic because he won’t carry out this perfectly simple task of killing his own daughter as he’d gladly agreed to do just a short time earlier.

Just because you said there was a marriage and there isn’t doesn’t mean your only alternative course of action is murder.

Gill’s lovelorn moon has been watching over Artemis since the very beginning of her existence. It is from seeing the newborn goddess serve as midwife to her mother for the birth of her twin, Apollo, that the moon first falls for her.

We next meet Kate as a young woman, played by Hailee Steinfeld. We soon see that – after years of practice – her aim is every bit as impressive as that of her idol, Hawkeye. She can shoot an arrow with such precision that she can ring a bell, although she does bring the bell tower down as well. But no one ever said that resisting alien invasion was going to be a tidy business.

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.

As we saw when poor Io was turned into a cow, there is no quicker way to be robbed of power than to lose your capacity to speak. And nowhere is this more true than of Actaeon, desperately trying to communicate with his own dogs but unable to say a word.

Even the conventions of artistic expression have to obey Artemis, it seems. It’s a glorious way to convey her absolute lawlessness, her insistence that everyone subscribes to her view of the world or pays the price.

No matter how many different aspects of Artemis we examine, it all comes back to this. She is a true predator. And – like the great white shark in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws – she has a doll’s eyes: empty of expression, fixed on death.

From Persephone’s perspective, these two deities are – as the Greek text makes plain – essentially the same. One god rapes her, the other agrees to it.

Hades isn’t a shameful son-in-law, even if he is your own brother.

Zeus now sends another messenger – this time the goddess Rhea – asking Demeter to rejoin the other immortals. Rhea is the mother of Zeus, Demeter, and Hades, so it really does seem that Zeus has sent his mum to apologize for his crummy behaviour because he was too scared to own up to it in person.

His jealousy is just as vicious as Hera’s, but the trope of the jealous husband is less pervasive in Greek myth than that of the jealous wife.

Men and gods try their best to interfere in the existence of Persephone, also called Kore, the archetypal innocent young woman. But Demeter never gives in, even if she has to cause a famine to make them reconsider their behaviour.

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.