Pandora and her... ?

For a number of years I've been following the blog The History Girls. They post once a week on a variety of subjects relating to history and their writing - most of them write historical fiction and they often talk about their research which is fascinating. Because they are always interesting and informative I really look forward to each new post. 

This is where I came across a review of Pandora's Jar by Natalie Haynes and was so intrigued that I bought the book. With a background in history including ancient Greece I was hooked immediately by the premise that all we ever hear about women in Greek myth and legend is in relation to men. Haynes has taken the stories most of us are familiar with and looks at them from the woman's point of view. It is illuminating to say the least. I thought I had a good grasp of Greek myth and legend but hadn't realised - although I should have - the bias that exists from the earliest versions of these myths. Neither the Bronze age nor ancient Athens were an ideal time for women and Greek gods and goddesses weren't paragons of virtue either with their behaviour often morally skewed to put it politely.

The women Haynes chooses - Pandora, Jocasta, Helen, Medusa, the Amazons, Eurydice, Phaedra, Medea and Penelope - are those whose names are familiar to many of us even if not all would know their stories but once she takes away the focus on the achievements of the men the stories we thought we knew becomes something very different. Using ancient sources - often only fragments including such things as paintings on ceramics, moving on to Homer, through other texts like the plays of Euripides and other depictions in art and books up to the present she pieces together the way in which these women lived and gives us a much better idea of them as real people. 

It wasn't just a place full of battles, sexual violence and frequently murder. The ancient Greek world was a scary one with gods and goddesses taking an active part in every day life. Many of these women - and the heroes whose tales they appear in - were supposedly the offspring of gods and their mostly unwilling human partners. Helen - she of the face that launched a thousand ships - was one such daughter of Zeus, who in the form of a swan - let's not be delicate here - raped her mother, Leda, and this is only one of many such encounters. Hera, the wife of Zeus, was so incensed by his infidelities that she put considerable time into punishing the unfortunate victims and their children. It didn't pay to reject a god or goddess either. You were likely to be turned into something - a monster or a tree seems to have been popular - or be pursued by a vengeful suitor who would make sure your life was a misery.

I won't go through the whole book in detail - if you want a detailed review I recommend Mary Hoffman's on The History Girls blog - but I do highly recommend reading it. It was eye opening to me and I am definitely going to read some of the modern retellings she mentions. Oh and the heading of this post - Pandora and her...? is because it turns out Pandora never had a box containing the ills of the world. She had a jar and the reason we all think it was a box is due to an incorrect translation back in the sixteenth century by the scholar, Erasmus.