Just to be clear, I am not suggesting for a moment that the ancient world isn’t packed with its own misogyny: it is. The literature and art which survive today were created in highly patriarchal societies which gave enormous power to a small group of wealthy men. But all too often it is the misogyny of more recent times that we are reading. The Homeric Hymn tells us that Persephone is forced to eat against her will; it does not gloss over this element of the story. And yet modern storytellers routinely ignore it. Let’s look again at how Theseus fares when his exploits are recounted in Roger Lancelyn Green’s much-loved Tales of the Greek Heroes, published in 1958. He cheerfully tells us about Theseus killing Sinis and Cercyon （and other ‘miscreants’）。 But he makes no mention of the rape of these men’s daughters, which Plutarch knew was worth including in his description. For more modern authors, it seems that murdering villains is fine, but raping their daughters must be overlooked. Of course, we might well feel that a classic children’s book is no place for rape: I don’t particularly disagree. But these myths are full of violence and we should at least ask why it is the violence against women that is removed in order to make our heroes uncomplicated adventurers.
Because that is certainly what happens to Theseus in Green’s version. When we come to Ariadne on Naxos, Dionysus sees her and makes her fall into a magic sleep, ‘and when she awoke, she remembered nothing about Theseus, nor how she came to Naxos, but willingly became the bride of Dionysus.’13 That is – you will forgive me if I am damaging your childhood delight in these stories – enormously convenient for Theseus. We might all wish our bad behaviour could be so easily forgotten. A page later, the new king of Crete sends Theseus ‘Phaedra in marriage, so that in spite of his loss of Ariadne, he still married a daughter of Minos.’ Well, thank goodness. I was beginning to worry that Theseus was the real victim here.
The stories are charmingly told. They were （and are – the book is still in print） the gateway for so many of us into Greek myth and the classical world. But because we read them as children, we don’t always consider them critically: we tend to see them as a neutral, authoritative version from which other versions deviate. And – like all books – they reflect the values of their time. So while I don’t want to dissuade you from reading these stories to children, I would urge you to counterbalance the quiet prejudice which lurks within them.
Just in case you were thinking that it’s only children’s books which are rewritten to make the male characters more heroic and the female characters less injured, incidentally, Robert Graves often did the same thing in his Greek Myths. Let’s go back to Persephone and Hades. Graves’ version of Persephone and the pomegranate has no mention of Hades force-feeding her. Rather, she is denounced by ‘one of Hades’ gardeners, Ascalaphus,’14 for having picked ‘a pomegranate from a tree in your orchard, and eaten seven seeds.’ This owes something to Pseudo-Apollodorus’ Bibliotheca. But in that version, Ascalaphus’ profession as a gardener – which, as far as I can discover, is Graves’ invention – goes unmentioned. For Pseudo-Apollodorus, Ascalaphus was witness to Hades/Pluto feeding Persephone a single pomegranate seed. He snitches on her and Demeter pays him back by trapping him under a rock in Hades.15 Graves omits this last detail, as well as changing the number of seeds Persephone eats （the voluntary consumption of seven seeds is in Book Five of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but, in that too, Persephone is not told about the rule of not eating until after she has done so） and making it Persephone’s sneaky theft rather than Hades’ force-feeding. The blameless profession given to Ascalaphus only adds to this: gardeners seem so decent and reliable. These choices may seem minor, but Graves presents his work as scholarly and neutral. It is certainly scholarly, it is anything but neutral: Graves has chosen to tell a composite of the versions in Pseudo-Apollodorus and Ovid and ignore the Homeric Hymn, and then he has omitted information about the pomegranate so that Persephone seems more responsible for her own misfortune. Each example may be minor on its own, but across a two-volume collection, they add up. And sadly, Graves’ editorial choices rarely work out well for women.
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Persephone is just one of a vast number of examples I could have chosen to illustrate this point. But none of the countless rapes which take place in Greek myth makes the slightest difference to Hippolytus of course, who is innocent of any crime. He is killed because of a wrongful accusation of rape made by his stepmother. I thought longer about including Phaedra in this book than about any of the other women, precisely because false rape allegations are such a difficult topic to discuss in a nuanced way. And without inadvertently adding to a problem. False rape claims are incredibly rare and receive far more column inches than they warrant, given their extreme rarity. But omitting Phaedra’s story – challenging as it is – seemed dishonest. She is a woman whose story has been told and retold through the ages, just like the others.