Madeline Miller's Blog, page 5
August 19, 2012
Myth of the Week: The Danaids
Monday, August 27th, 2012
It’s great to be back! Lots of news to share, including the US paperback release (tomorrow!), and upcoming events in both the US and UK. But first, the story of the Danaids, or Fifty Brides for Fifty Brothers.
The Greeks didn’t have a hell the way we think of it, but they did have Tartarus, a region of the underworld where ancient bad eggs were sent to suffer eternal torments. It had several famous inhabitants, including Tantalus, Sisyphus and Ixion, each condemned for heinous crimes against the gods: Tantalus killed his son, cooked him into a meal, and then tried to trick the gods into eating it. Sisyphus likewise mocked and deceived the gods, and Ixion attempted to rape the goddess Hera. For his offense, Tantalus was condemned to raging thirst and hunger, with food and drink eternally just out of reach (the origin of our word, tantalize). Ixion was suspended on a flaming wheel. Sisyphus had to push a huge rock up a hill, which would inevitably roll back down just as he reached the top.
Sisyphus and his rock
But it wasn’t only men who ended up in Tartarus. In Roman legends, there were also 49 women there, the daughters of a man called Danaus (hence their name, the Danaids, daughters of Danaus). Their crime wasn’t against the gods but men: they murdered their husbands on their wedding night. In order to wash the blood from their hands and be absolved they must fill a tub with water–a tub with holes in its bottom. Forgiveness, in other words, is impossible.
The Danaids trying to fill their tub
The Danaids didn’t start out murderers. Their father, Danaus, was a prince of Egypt, son of the great king Belus, who was in turn descended from Io—the Io who was turned into a cow and chased by a gadfly to Egypt. One of the things that I find interesting about this story is how the ancient Greeks casually grafted their own mythology onto Egypt’s, claiming that the throne of mythological Egypt was ruled by Greeks.
Io as a cow, with Hermes on the left
Danaus and his twin brother Aegyptus were heirs to the Egyptian throne. Danaus had fifty daughters, and Aegyptus fifty sons. The two brothers fought incessantly over who was to rule, and eventually Aegyptus threatened Danaus, demanding that he marry off his daughters to Aegyptus� sons.
Angry and frightened, Danaus fled with his daughters to Greece, with the fifty sons in hot pursuit. Once there, Danaus seemed to have a change of heart, and agreed to the marriage. How they decided which daughter would marry which son is unfortunately not in any version I could find. Perhaps the method of distribution didn’t make the record because it was far less juicy than what followed: Danaus had only agreed in order to revenge himself upon his brother. In secret, he gave each of his daughters a knife and commanded them, on their collective wedding night, to kill their husbands. Forty-nine of his daughters obeyed, and dispatched their new spouses. But the fiftieth, Hypermnestra, had fallen in love with her husband, Lynceus, and instead helped him escape.
A melancholy Hypermnestra, courtesy of Indiana University
Danaus was enraged by his daughter’s betrayal and imprisoned Hypermnestra—and this is where the story starts to fragment. In some version Lynceus kills Danaus to free her and avenge his brothers. In other versions, Danaus agrees to free Hypermnestra, and gives her to Lynceus (a bit less dramatic). Either way, I am fascinated by this story—what was it about Hypermnestra that she couldn’t go through with it? Or, maybe, what was it about Lynceus? Answering that question would make for a great novel. As wouldthe fate of the other 49 sisters who aren’t whisked directly to Tartarus, but rather offered again in marriage. Their father, recognizing that potential suitors might not exactly be lining up, holds a foot race and unloads his tainted daughters as prizes.
A Danaid with her urn. Photo by Yair Haklai
The story’s overall message is clear: don’t murder your husband. But more interesting to me is the way it dramatizes the conflict that many women must have felt between allegiance to their family and allegiance to their husbands. How do you balance the demands of being a daughter and being a wife? Where should your greatest loyalty lie, and how far should you go to honor it? In the ancient world, this question would have had frighteningly high stakes: disobeying your father wasn’t just bad—it could be a killing offense, since the patriarch’s word was law. Once a woman married, that power was supposed to transfer to her husband. Yet the Danaids had been married against their will, and for less than a day. Shouldn’t their father’s interests still prevail? Forty-nine of the Danaids thought so. Or perhaps that doesn’t give them enough credit for independent thought—perhaps they were cleverly striking a blow for their own power. With Aegyptus� sons gone, Danaus and his daughters would inherit the Egyptian throne uncontested.
Either way, it seems monstrously unfair that Danaus escaped the whole affair Tartarus-free. No filling leaky tubs for him, even though the plan and weapons were his idea. Unfair too, when we compare the Danaids� crime with Tantalus and Sisyphus and Ixion: if you’re a man, you have to flout the gods to get condemned; if you’re a woman, killing your husband will do it.
In closing, I have to include the link to , where you can try your hand at the Danaids� task for yourself. I hope that your week turns out to be better than theirs!
June 23, 2012
Historical Fiction Round-Up
Saturday, June 23rd, 2012
I was so pleased to be asked to do this year, andhad an enormously good time picking and reading the five books. I hope that you enjoy them as much as I did!
June 18, 2012
Some Recent Essays on Homer, Troy and Adaptation
A round up of my recent essays that are available online:
. An essay that ran inThe Wall Street Journal‘s Traveler’s Tales series about my visit toTroy.
. An essay inThe Telegraphabout howI learned to enjoy modern retellings of Classics.
. A piece I wrote forThe Guardian, aboutHomer being one of my literary heroes.
June 17, 2012
2012 Orange Prize for Fiction
Sunday, June 17th, 2012
My apologies for taking so long to post the news here, but I hope better late than never. It is my huge honor to announce that on May 30th, I was awarded the . I was then, and still feel now, completely humbled, bowled over, and struck dumb with joy. Simply going to the reception for the shortlistees felt like such an honor–I was sharing the shortlist with Ann Patchett (more on how amazing she is coming up), as well as Georgina Harding, Anne Enright, Cynthia Ozick and Esi Edugyan. Each of their books is terrific.
It was a particularly poignant evening because the Orange Prize is going to be Orange no more; the telecommunications company Orange has decided to stop sponsoring the prize (no word yet on who the new sponsor will be). It was such a privilege to meet Kate Mosse, one of the original founders of the prize, and hear stories from its early days. It was a privilege too to hear her speak about the Orange Prize’s mission: bringing great fiction by women writers to everyone. In a world where , the Orange Prize serves a vital function.
This year’s Prize Chair was the novelist Joanna Trollope, whose grace, thoughtfulness and smarts were an inspiration. , followed by my acceptance speech. Which is a good time to mention the lovely Ann Patchett again, whose dress I was wearing. Ann, as you may know, already won the Orange Prize once, for her terrific Bel Canto. This time around (she was nominated for State of Wonder), she unfortunately couldn’t make it to the reception because of previous book obligations. So she had contacted me and said that she had a great orange dress, and did I want to wear it? My answer was an emphatic yes, especially after discovering that luckily/strangely, we are exactly the same size. As I said above: an amazing, and incredibly generous, woman.
I only had a few moments at the podium to thank the enormous number of people who were so helpful to me in writing this book; I didn’t even make it through half of everyone who deserved mention. So let me take a moment now to name three groups that I especially wanted to thank: my teachers, from grade school through graduate school, who supported and nurtured my love of Classics, literature and writing. My amazing students, whom I feel so lucky to know every single day. And my readers (and if you’re reading this, I think you count). In the wake of the prize, I received such a moving flood of notes from people offering congratulations and kind words about my work. After so many years spent writing in solitude, it is deeply meaningful to me to hear that people have connected to these characters. Thank you. And I will try to reply to everyone, it just might take a bit of time for me to do it.
I promise to post some pictures soon from my UK trip, and to return to Myths of the Week once I catch my breath a bit. In the meantime, I am hard at work on a short story set in Homer’s world, due to be published next month. More on that to come!
May 27, 2012
Atoms, Agony and Gallimimi
Monday, May 28th, 2012
I’m sitting in the Boston airport as I type this, waiting for my flight to London to attend the Orange Prize shortlist reception and start my UK paperback tour. Very exciting! It seemed like the perfect time to post something on etymologies (isn’t it always a good time for etymology?) And hopefully next week I’ll be back with a myth as well.
Those of you who follow this blog , but this is such a great etymology that I couldn’t resist. Herpetology, or the study of reptiles, snakes and amphibians, comes from the ancient Greek “herpo� which means to creep, crawl or slither. In other words, Herpetology is “the study of creepers.� Interestingly enough, in the ancient world, this didn’t just mean snakes and their ilk. The Greek noun herpustercould refer to a reptile or a crawling child. Hmmm.
A creeping salamander.
What really makes this etymology cool is the fact that the “h� sound in Greek very often became “s� in its Latin counterpart. So “herpo� became “serpo,� also meaning to slither. And from there we, of course, get our English word serpent. Other examples of the “h� to “s� change include hept- (Greek root for seven) and Latin sept-, as well as “hals� which is the Greek for salt, which becomes Latin “sal.�
Thersitical. This one isn’t really etymology, but eponym. Thersitical, which means loud-mouthed, rude, and foul, is named after Thersites who was a loud-mouthed, rude and foul character in the Iliad. He’s the only common soldier who dares to stand up to the kings and tell them what he really thinks; in return, Odysseus beats him savagely. He also plays an amazing role in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, where he steals every scene he’s in with his bitter, angry and hilarious diatribes against the hypocrisy he sees around him. Among many other acid observation he notes that “Agamemnon is an honest fellow enough…but he has not so much brain as earwax� and that Achilles has “too much blood and too little brain.”� In his most famous line, he sums up the Trojans and Greeks alike: “lechery, lechery, still wars and lechery. Nothing else holds fashion!�
Two fighters in an all-out agon. Photo credit, Marie-Lan Nguyen
In its modern English usage, agony has come to be an exclusively negative word, but in its original Greek sense, it simply meant “contest”—most often in the physical sense. A boxing match, for instance, was an agon, as was a race—any situation in which contestants strove to beat each other. From this we also get the word “antagonist� which originally just meant opponent—the person against you in the agon. So, although agony is something you suffer in English, I prefer the Greek, where it seems like something you can fight, and maybe win.
Atom. This is a very old word, used by Greek and Roman philosophers to refer to the smallest particles imaginable—the foundation stones that built everything else, and so were themselves “unsplittable”—from “a� (not) and “tomos� (cut). Of course, nowadays we know that atoms can be split. But I like that the name remains anyway—in homage to the amazing ancient philosophers who had the foresight to imagine that the world was made up of things they couldn’t see.
Epicurus, an ancient Greek philosopher who taught about atoms.
Gallimimus is a ostrich-like dinosaur, whose name is actually Latin, from gallus, meaning chicken, and mimus, meaning mimic—but Latin mimus is itself derived from the Greek mimos, which means an actor or mimic, so I felt like it still counted. And, of course, our word “mime� also comes from it. For all you Jurassic Park fans out there, Gallimimus makes a brief cameo in the first movie: “they’re flocking this way!�
A young gallimimus skeleton. Photo credit, Eduard Solà
I wish you all a wonderful week and (those in the US) a great Memorial Day weekend!
May 22, 2012
Stray Reading Thoughts: Enchantments
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
I’m in the middle of Kathryn Harrison’s novel Enchantments right now. The book narrates the events before, during and after the fall of the the Romanovs, through the eyes of “Masha,� Rasputin’s daughter. I’m enjoying it very much, and particularly admire Masha’s sharp, satiric voice. Having survived the revolution she finds herself in an American traveling circus. She proposes act after act to the owner, and finally hits on one that will satisfy him:
The idea had been to have two bears doing somersaults while I waltzed with a third, Hannibal, and an assortment of lions, pumas, leopards, and tigers sat on their haunches, looking at us�.. For the Daughter of the Mad Monk to waltz with a bear to Strauss while a dozen potentially murderous animals watched was enough, even for Americans.
UK events, NPR and other news
Tuesday, May 22nd, 2012
I’ve just in include my UK paperback tour. It includes two events at the Hay Festival, which I’m very excited about, as well as terrific evenings at the Bristol Festival of Ideas, Topping Books and the Twickenham Library.
In other news, I recently wrote Elizabeth von Arnim’s Enchanted April. It was such a pleasure for me to get to write about it, and I hope that you enjoy the piece.
There are just a few days left before I head off to the UK for the shortlist events, so I am busily repacking. Given all the traveling, Myth of the Week has been on hiatus for the past week, but I promise that I have a good one coming very soon. The pits of Tartarus aren’t just for men anymore�
May 7, 2012
Greek Etymology for the Week
Monday, May 6th, 2012
Happy May! Here are five more etymologies to kick off the week.
Cacophony. This word, meaning terrible, dissonant noise, is literally just the Greek for “bad sounding� or “bad speaking”�kakos means bad, and phon- speaking. Phon- shows up elsewhere in English, most notable in telephone (far speaking), and in cacophony’s opposite, euphony, (good speaking/sounding). By the way, those of you who are Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans can rest assured that Joss Whedon knows his Greek: one of the show’s Big Bads is an old vampire named Kakistos—the superlative of kakos—which literally means the worst.
The vampire Kakistos, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Portrayed by Jeremy Roberts
Rhinoceros. A favorite zoo animal from my childhood was the great, saggy-armored rhinoceros, whose name comes right from ancient Greek. Rhinos is the word for nose and ceros means horn. So, a rhinoceros is appropriately named for its most distinctive feature, its “nose-horn.� Rhino- also shows up in several other English compounds, most commonly in rhinoplasty, or nose job.
A White Rhino mother and her baby. Photo credit, Zigomar
Rhapsody. This lovely word has an equally lovely origin. In ancient Greece, a “rhapsode� was a bard who traveled from town to town performing epic poetry, most often stories from Homer. The word rhapsode itself has a further etymology, from the Greek “rhapt-� which means to stitch or sew, and “oid-� meaning song. The job of the bards was to stitch together different pieces of verse to create a whole piece that would go over well with that night’s particular audience.
An ancient performer, with lyre. Photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen
Moron. It has always tickled me that this petty playground insult is right out of the ancient world. It’s from the Greek moros, meaning stupid or foolish.
Pterodactyl. The dinosaur of the week is pterodactyl, whose name derives from the ancient Greek word for wing or feather, “pteron,� and “dactyl� which means finger. Put together, the two make the “winged finger� dinosaur we’ve come to know and love. As a very young child I had trouble pronouncing this word, usually turning it into “petrodactyl.”� Stone finger? Certainly would make it harder to fly�.
I wish you all a happy and high-flying week!
April 29, 2012
Greek Etymologies II
Monday, April 30th, 2012
Hello California! I’m excited to be starting the CA leg of my tour, and if you’re in LA, San Francisco or San Diego and want to hear me speak .
Rather than a Myth of the Week, I thought I would do on modern words with ancient roots. Below are five more of my favorites.
The Liberty Bell, a Philadelphia symbol
Philadelphia. When I moved to Philadelphia from New York City, I was thirteen and deeply reluctant. For one thing, I was leaving all my friends behind. For another, the city seemed spookily deserted to me after the bustle of Manhattan. In my terrible teenage way, I was particularly irritated by Philadelphia’s cheery, ever-present slogan: The City of Brotherly Love!
But then I started taking Greek, and realized that the phrase isn’t some pollyanna PR line, it’s the literal translation of Philadephia. Phil—is the Greek root for love, and adelphos is the word for brother. Well. That shut me up. The moral of the story? All sulky teens need is a little ancient Greek.
Psychopomp/Psychopompos. This word doesn’t get very much airtime nowadays, but I think it should. A psychopomp is a being whose job it is to guide the souls of the dead to the afterlife, and in ancient Greece this was the messenger god Hermes, whose epithet was Psychopompos. It comes from the Greek word psyche, meaning soul, which has found its way into English in all sorts of compounds, including psychiatrist—a word which literally means “soul doctor� (iatros is Greek for doctor). In a lovely bit of metaphor, psycheis also the Greek word for butterfly.
Hermes (at left) on a vase-painting
Thepomp- part comes from the Greek for escort, or guide, and can refer to either a single escort, or an entire cohort, making it the root of our “pomp� in pomp and circumstance. So, psychopomp literally means soul-guide.By the way, this word frequently provokes hilarity among my Greek students: “Dude, that guy was psycho dzdzܲ!�
Apocalypse. This word comes from the Greek roots apo (away from, or un-), and calypto (cover, conceal). So it literally means an uncovering, or, in the biblical sense, revelation. The “calyps� part of apocalypse is the exact same root as the name Calpyso, the nymph from the Odysseywho holds Odysseus (sort of) against his will for seven years. She is the opposite of revelation—a being who uses obfuscation and wiles to keep Odysseus with her, rather than helping him on his journey home.
The nymph Calypso offering Odysseus immortality if he will stay and be her love
Pachycephalosaurus. What could be better than giant lizards that bonk each other in the head? If you answered “nothing,� then pachycephalosaurus is the dinosaur for you. Pachy- means thick, or stout; cephal- means head and saurus is our old friend lizard. Which makes pachycephalosaurus one hard-headed lizard. These dinosaurs had a domed, extra-thick skull plate that, according to some scientists, they would use to batter each other with, kind of the way rams do.
Both pachy- and cephal- show up elsewhere in English. Pachy- is part of “pachyderm� literally, thick-skin, another word for elephant. Cephal- goes into all sorts of medical diagnoses like “encephalitis.”� But the important thing to remember, I think, is that there were dinosaurs who developed extra-thick heads because they liked to whack into things.
The skull of a pachycephalosaurus. Photo credit to user Ballista from English wikipedia
Gubernatorial, “relating to a governor,� is one of my favorite words, because its context is almost always serious, yet you’re still saying the word “goober.”� As a child it was classed in my mind with avuncular—another intimidating word that turned out to have a really easy meaning (uncle-ish).
Gubernatorial comes from the Greek kubernetes(koo-ber-nay-tays), which originally meant captain of a ship. Over time, the “k� blurred with its close cousin “g� (both sounds made against the palate), and produced the goober sound that we all know and love. Linguistically the “b� in the middle of the word is closely associated with “v� so it was just an easy step to “governor� from there.
By the way, if you’re looking for a factoid for your next cocktail party, try this: the honors society “phi beta kappa� is actually a Greek acronym for the following phrase: philosophia biou kubernetes—“Love of learning is the guide (captain) of life.�
Have a great week!
April 23, 2012
Myth of the Week: Atalanta
Monday, April 23rd, 2012
As a child reading myth-books, I found heroines to be thin on the ground. I’ve written before about how much I loved the goddess , but I also yearned for powerful female mortalsas well. Unfortunately, my early myth books contained only one such woman. The good news? It was Atalanta, and she was straight-up amazing.
Atalanta the huntress
Atalanta was born the daughter of a king, but her father, who had wanted a son, exposed her to die in the wilderness. Instead, she was adopted by a mother-bear, who nursed and raised her. Atalanta grew up to be a master hunter and athlete, particularly known for her fleetness of foot. She was supposed to be so simultaneously beautiful and terrifying that all who saw her were struck dumb. She could hold her own against any man, and her name itself is the perfect retort to her father’s prejudice: it means �of equal weight.�
I didn’t have much in common with Atalanta–I was horribly slow when we ran laps in gym class, and the thought of hunting animals horrified me–but that didn’t stop me from loving her. I especially appreciated the fact that she never went begging back to her ungrateful father, but chose to go off and make her fortune as a free hero. The first proof of her mettle came when she was attacked by two brutal , and single-handedly killed them both.
A golden Atalanta, with the Calydonian boar's head at her side.
Next she joined the Calydonian Boar hunt, organized for all the greatest heroes of the day. Atalanta didn’t strike the fatal blow against the monstrous animal, but she was the first to wound it, and in honor of her courage, the hero Meleager awarded her the boar-skin. Not everyone was pleased with this decision, and it ended up leading to Meleager’s death. A story for another time!
Thanks to her prowess with arms, Atalanta was also invited to join Jason and his Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Sadly, after being listed as one of the heroes involved, she doesn’t really figure in any of the rest of the adventures. It would be interesting to read an account of the whole myth from her perspective—there’s a novel in that, for sure!
Atalanta wrestles Peleus, Achilles' father
One of my favorite stories about Atalanta is her famous wrestling match with Peleus, Achilles� father. As some of you may know from my book, Peleus was quite the wrestler—strong enough to have beaten the goddess Thetis. But when Atalanta challenged him? She defeated him thoroughly, and their bout became a popular scene in art.
Thanks to her growing fame, Atalanta’s father decided that, actually, he wanted his daughter after all. He formally acknowledged her, then exercised his paternal right to marry her off. Atalanta, enraged, said that first her suitors would have to beat her in a footrace. If they lost, they would be put to death. Atalanta’s ruthless father thought that that sounded just fine—he’d still get to keep their courting gifts, after all.
Several (I can’t help but think foolish) young men decided to try their feet against Atalanta’s. All of them lost until a young man named Hippomenes (or Melanion in other versions), prayed to the goddess of love, Aphrodite, to aid him. She gave him three magical, golden apples from the Garden of the Hesperides, and told him that if he threw them to the side during the race, Atalanta would be sure to go after them, allowing him to beat her.
Atalanta, stooping to pick up the golden apple, as Hippomenes runs ahead
When I was really young, this part of the story baffled me, because it seemed so out of character for Atalanta to care about gold. After all, this is the same woman who grew up roughing it and drinking bear milk, with no need for princess-comforts. It wasn’t until I got older that I understood that the apples were the ultimate symbol of heroic distinction—retrieving one is even one of the labors of Hercules—and they would have tempted any serious fame-hungry hero. Her desire to have them is of a kind with her desire to display the Calydonian boar-skin she won.
Aphrodite’s cheat works, and Hippomenes wins the race. For some reasons, Atalanta doesn’t seem to hold it against him—perhaps she approves of his cleverness, as well as his athleticism. Further, he seems to appreciate her: rather than trying to turn her into a traditional ancient wife, the two become comrades in hunting together.
In my childhood myth-books, this was where the story always ended, which gave me the impression that Atalanta’s life concluded happily. Some years later, I was startled to discover that there’s more to the tale—a bizarre and racy ending that goes like this: Atalanta and Hippomenes are out hunting one day when they are overcome by intense desire for each other. In some versions this is because Hippomenes didn’t properly thank Aphrodite for her help with the golden apples, and the goddess is getting her revenge. In others it’s simply because they are in love. They begin coupling, and are so distracted by pleasure that they don’t notice that they are lying together within the bounds of a god’s temple (depending on the version, the god could be Aphrodite, Zeus, or even the Eastern goddess Cybele). Sex in a sanctuary was considered blasphemous pollution, or miasma, as the Greeks called it, and punishment was swift. The angry god/goddess turns the two of them into lions as punishment. The End.
A lion. Photo by Wwelles14
Strange, right? And hard to parse, I think, beyond the obvious message: don’t have sex in a temple. The only consolation is that at least the god/goddess picked an appropriate animal–Ithink the punishment would have been a lot worse if the famous, beloved huntress had been turned into, say, a chicken.
I just can’t close this myth without mentioning Marlo Thomas� “Princess Atalanta� story from Free to Be You and Me. I don’t know about you, but I listened to that tape over and over and over again as a child. with Marlo Thomas and Alan Alda (!) doing the voices.
By the way, thanks to everyone for their comments about last week’s Greek etymology post. I promise there are more like that coming!
