The true spirit of the Amazons, Haynes argues, surely lies in Buffy the Vampire Slayer rather than in (say) Graves’s creepy poem about Achilles, the Greek hero who kills the Amazon Penthesilea in the Trojan war. Often, those choices have involved downplaying, exoticising or dehumanising female characters. A “straight”, canonical retelling of Greek myth is impossible – the vast wealth of different versions and variants in Greek literature means that any reteller must make creative choices. His classic retelling of legendary tales is often regarded as a definitive, somehow neutral work Haynes rightly points out that it is not. Robert Graves comes in for a bit of flak. Who, precisely, is doing the looking at Greek myths, and who is interpreting the female characters, is an important focus of the book. Haynes examines the original sources for the characters, noting how, often – though far from invariably – later incarnations have underplayed the much fuller, more complex roles given to them in antiquity.īeyoncé’s “Hold up” video. Part of the project of this hugely lively, fun, yet serious book is to unpeel the accretions that have affixed themselves over time, like barnacles on a shipwreck, to the women of Greek myth, from Pandora to Helen of Troy via Phaedra and Medea. The modern era, or at least the early modern era, had not served Dido well.

As she explains in her introduction to Pandora’s Jar, Haynes was saying so on the radio when she was surprised to hear her interviewer describing the character as “a vicious schemer”, a version of Dido, it turned out, that was not Virgil’s, but Christopher Marlowe’s. Dido is a supremely sympathetic literary figure: dignified, humane, tragic. Dido, ruler of a nascent north African nation, was the queen with whom Aeneas, the hero of Virgil’s epic poem the Aeneid, fell in love – before abandoning her to seek his destiny in Italy.

I t was actually a Roman mythological figure that compelled Natalie Haynes, author of the Women’s prize-shortlisted A Thousand Ships, to make female characters in the Greek myths the subject of her new work of nonfiction.

A thousand novel by natalie haynes