When the question arises – why retell Greek myths with women at their core? – it is loaded with a strange assumption. The underpinning belief is that women are and always have been on the margins of these stories. That the myths have always focused on men and that women have only ever been minor figures. This involves ignoring the fact that there is no ‘real’ or ‘true’ version of any myth, because they arise from multiple authors across multiple locations over a long period. The version of a story we find in the Iliad or the Odyssey is not somehow more valid than a version we find in a fifth-century BCE play or on the side of a vase merely because it is older. Homer drew on earlier traditions just as the fifth-century BCE playwright Euripides or the sculptor Phidias did. When Euripides wrote about the Trojan War, he centred his plays on the female characters: Andromache, Electra, Helen, Hecabe, and two Iphigenia plays, offering different, contradictory versions of her fate. Sometimes the stories centred on men have been taken more seriously by scholars. The Iliad was for a long time considered grander, more epic than the Odyssey, because the former is full of war and the latter is stuffed with women and adventures. The nineteenth-century writer Samuel Butler even suggested – with debatable seriousness – that the Odyssey must have been written by a woman, so packed was it with female characters. What on earth makes us believe that the Iliad, where Helen is a relatively minor player, is somehow more authentic than Euripides’ Helen? If Ovid could see that the stories of Greek myth could be told just as well from women’s perspectives as men’s, how did we forget? When people ask why tell the stories that we know best from the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective, or Circe’s perspective, they presuppose that the story ‘should’ be told from Odysseus’ point of view. Which means the answer to this question should always be: because she’s in the damn story. Why wouldn’t we want to hear from her?
Conclusion
WHEN THE CONTENTS OF PANDORA’S JAR ESCAPE INTO THE WORLD, we have tended to see this as something bad. As discussed in Chapter One, for ancient authors, the contents of the jar aren’t always themselves evil; in some versions of the myth they are good. But those versions haven’t prevailed as the favoured narrative, perhaps because we find it easier to believe that things aren’t as good as they used to be. There is an enormous temptation to believe in some sort of declinism: that things are always getting slightly worse. And when Zeus sends Pandora to mortals （the price he sets against fire, which Prometheus stole for us）， he intends her to cause trouble.
But the question remains: is the trouble something she does, by opening a jar? Or is it something she is? Pandora is the first woman; thanks to her （according to Hesiod）， the carefree age of men comes to an end. But you’ll forgive me for suggesting that an all-male age with no women （and no fire） sounds incredibly boring. Of course it was carefree, what the hell would anyone care about?
Pandora is an agent of change, and the embodiment of the will of Zeus. She is not an unmitigated evil, as her box-opening reputation might have you believe. She is dual: kalon kakon, beautiful and ugly, good and evil. What Pandora brings to mortals is complexity. And that is true of all the women in this book: some have been painted as villains （Clytemnestra, Medea）， some as victims （Eurydice, Penelope）， some have been literally monstered （Medusa）。 But they are much more complicated than these thumbnail descriptions allow. Their stories should be read, seen, heard in all their difficult, messy, murderous detail. They aren’t simple, because nothing interesting is simple.
We do not live in a world of heroes and villains, and if we believe we do, we should really consider the possibility that we haven’t thought about things properly. We cannot hope to make sense of our stories or ourselves （myths are a mirror of us, after all） if we refuse to look at half of the picture. Or – worse – don’t even notice half of it is missing. This book is an attempt to fill in some of the blank space.
Acknowledgements
GEORGE MORLEY IS THE SMARTEST EDITOR A PERSON COULD HOPE for, as well as being a generally wonderful human being in all regards. I’m so glad she wanted this book. Peter Straus is the Platonic ideal of agents: I was crazy-lucky the day he took me on, and I still am. He is in complete denial about how awesome he is, so feel free to tell him if you ever bump into him.
The book was edited during lockdown. There are possibly better address books than mine for such an eventuality, but it’s hard to imagine whose. Roslynne Bell, Paul Cartledge and Patrick O’Sullivan all used their quarantine time to read and make corrections. They saved me from carelessness and/or stupidity more times than I care to think: remaining mistakes are mine, of course. Chloe May was my super-patient desk editor, Marissa Constantinou read the manuscript alongside George, Susan Opie was the copy-editor.