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Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(106)

Author:Natalie Haynes

13. Ibid 2 88.

14. Ibid 19 137.

15. Ibid 19 157–8.

16. http://www.beazley.ox.ac.uk/XDB/ASP/recordDetails.asp?id=F322BAD4-652B-4E56-AFE7-E51A636F2E81&noResults=&recordCount=&databaseID=&search=.

17. https://www.musee-orsay.fr/en/collections/works-in-focus/search/commentaire_id/penelope-23467.html?no_cache=1&cHash=0c0b8e3261

18. davidligare.com/paintings.html.

19. https://www.namuseum.gr/en/collection/klasiki-periodos-2/.

20. Held by the Metropolitan Museum, New York: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/16951

21. Peck, A. and Irish, C. (2001), Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design, 1875–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press), p. 145: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=n2r1mG-zoUAC&pg=PA147&lpg=PA147&dq=Penelope+tapestry+new+york&source=bl&ots=gQLNphwqxq&sig=ACfU3U0CkHVYd1qaLuMYU3SQfS3YEZ-qPA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj7rqm4qszmAhWSiVwKHUqrCIEQ6AEwEXoECA0QAQ#v=onepage&q=Penelope%20tapestry%20new%20york&f=false.

22. https://www.marianmaguire.com/2017---odysseus--penelope.html.

23. Homer, Odyssey 24 149.

24. Ibid 21 1.

25. Ovid, Heroides 1.41.

26. Ibid 51.

27. Canongate paperback edition, p. xxi.

Further Reading and Other Sources

A FEW NOTES ON THE TEXT AND SOURCES. FIRSTLY, AS YOU WILL doubtless have noticed, I play fast and loose with transliterating and translating names from Greek and Latin. Sometimes I go for a Greek transliteration (Heracles, though really it should be Herakles), sometimes I go for the Romanized version (Oedipus), sometimes I go rogue with the English version (Helen)。 There is no system, no coherence: just years of thinking of characters and writers by certain forms of their names and a reluctance to change, I suppose.

The translations in this book are all mine: I rarely go formal unless it feels necessary. My versions of Aeschylus and Euripides in particular are closer to actual speech than lofty theatricality (this is my transparent bid to be allowed to translate them for the stage at a future date)。 I own a lot of Greek and Latin texts, but many, many more are freely available online: Perseus is my website of choice, and there are others. They are a wonderful resource, provided by academics who have made the world a better, more democratic place to study. I won’t offer a list of which editions or textual traditions I followed, because this isn’t an academic book and no one ever asks me for more details about these things.

I am often asked, though, which translations are good. It’s a hard question to answer, because I tend to use ones which I have owned since school or college, because they’re already on my shelves. Occasionally I replace an old one with a new one. (Emily Wilson’s translation of the Odyssey is obviously wonderful, so I ditched my previous versions for hers. I say ‘ditched’, but I think I own four different translations of the Odyssey, for no good reason. Inexplicably, I only have a Greek edition of the first twelve books and use Perseus for the rest. There is no logic to my library.) As a general rule, Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics are what I have, and they’re usually pretty good. I own dozens of Loeb editions, which are sometimes more erratic in the quality of the translations, but always useful when there’s a tricky bit of Greek. There are lots of old translations available for free online, but be warned: they can be pretty impenetrable.

Non-ancient books which made this book possible include: Emma Bridges & Djibril al-Ayad, Making Monsters; Lillian E. Doherty, Gender and the Interpretation of Classical Myth; Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth; Edith Hall, Greek Tragedy (as well as her terrific essays and blog posts about everything from Phaedra to Jocasta); Mary R. Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth; Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons; Matthew Wright, The Lost Plays of Greek Tragedy; Froma I. Zeitlin, Playing the Other. It feels perverse to try to distil a lifetime of reading into a manageably short list, so I am only offering the books which lived on my desk for weeks at a time while I was writing this book. The rest are just occupying bits of my brain which I probably need for other things. Too late now.

A fullish list of the artworks mentioned (including their place of residence at the time of writing) is below (thanks to Roz, who did literally all the hard work here)。 Any omissions are mine; I hope you’ll forgive me.

PANDORA

Cousin, Jean (ca. 1550), Eva Prima Pandora, Paris, Louvre, inv. RF 2373.

Howard, Henry (1834), oil on mahogany panel, The Opening of Pandora’s Vase, London, Sir John Soane Museum, inv. SM P6.

Rossetti, Dante Gabriel (1871), oil on canvas, Pandora, private collection.