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Myths may be the home of the miraculous, but they are also mirrors of us. Which version of a story we choose to tell, which characters we place in the foreground, which ones we allow to fade into the shadows: these reflect both the teller and the reader, as much as they show the characters of the myth.
We have made space in our storytelling to rediscover women who have been lost or forgotten. They are not villains, victims, wives and monsters: they are people.
Prometheus (whose name literally means ‘foresight’) had warned his brother not to accept any gifts from Zeus. Epimetheus’ name means ‘hindsight’, and perhaps this is why he forgets that a present from Zeus might be something other than a box tied up with ribbon.
If they had been willing to trawl through fragments of Theognis’ Elegies, from the sixth century BCE, they might have found a short passage which suggests that Pandora’s jar is full of good things rather than bad. When the jar is opened, everything good – Self-control, Trust etc. – flies away, which is why we so rarely find them among mortal men. Only Elpis – Hope – remains, as one good which did not abandon us.
for the ancients, Pandora’s role as the ancestor of all women was far more important than her disputed role in opening the world to incessant evil. Even if, for Hesiod, these two amount to much the same thing.
Zeus may wish us ill, in other words, but that doesn’t mean Pandora herself is evil, any more than the lightning which Zeus hurls at those of us who displease him is evil. Lightning is neutral, neither good nor bad, however much we fear it. Perhaps we can accept that Pandora is the same, unless we choose to see her otherwise.
When women take up space, there is less available for men. But it means we get a whole story instead of half of one. It scarcely needs saying that our understanding of the story of Oedipus is enriched when we know the story of Jocasta, and vice versa.
I suspect we don’t see her reflected back at us from paintings because she has committed the ultimate sin against art: she is an older woman.
she is that rarest and most dangerous of things: a woman who doesn’t become invisible to men even as she ages.
And if history has taught us anything, it is that women making a noise – whether speaking or shouting – tend to be viewed as intrinsically disruptive.
To some people, a woman with power and a voice is always a monster. And for some of these people, death and disfigurement are an appropriate response to such women.
The shock of seeing Garbati’s reversal of this, of Perseus’ head in Medusa’s hand, is incredible. It jolts the viewer into acknowledging a double standard: it is so rare in art to see men objectified, even rarer for the objectifier to be a woman.
The fear that a woman might leave the house and catch the eye of a man other than her husband amounted to almost a collective neurosis: the penalty for adultery was more severe than the penalty for rape.
So Clytemnestra is a byword in the ancient world, and ever since, for a bad wife, the worst wife even. But for wronged, silenced, unvalued daughters, she is something of a hero: a woman who refuses to be quiet when her child is killed, who disdains to accept things and move on, who will not make the best of what she has. She burns like the beacon she waits for at the beginning of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. And if that means men think twice about drinking from a wine cup with her murderous rage depicted upon it, so be it. She would – at least in Aeschylus’ depiction – relish their fear.
We must be careful, of course, not to judge ancient characters by modern standards: it is simply a waste of time expecting people who lived thousands of years ago to feel the same way about the nuances of women’s lives as we do.
Professor Edith Hall has argued with characteristic scholarly vigour that she loathes Euripides’ Hippolytus, because it legitimizes rape myths.10 By dramatizing a story in which a woman fabricates a claim of rape, we give vastly more prominence to Phaedra’s wrongdoing than we do to, for example, Theseus’ succession of rapes, forced marriages, kidnaps and child rape, which are still largely undramatized today.
But these myths are full of violence and we should at least ask why it is the violence against women that is removed in order to make our heroes uncomplicated adventurers.
