Natalie Haynes
Image Credit: James Betts
For those who haven’t read many Greek myths or retellings of ancient mythology, could you give our readers an overview of the texts and sources we have and also perhaps your view on the recent growing interest in Greek mythology in the publishing industry in the UK particularly?
So, Ancient Greece is about 2000 years long. This is the bit that people always don’t know – I think it seems like it goes, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, and then William the Conqueror, but that’s not really what happened, obviously. It starts in the Bronze Age, which is when most of these myths are set, although it’s a bit hard to date myths that only contain Gods because obviously, they don’t age, so that makes things a little bit trickier… But generally, we place the Trojan War at the 12th-13th century BC, so around three thousand years ago; that’s the heroic age of Greek myth. Before that, were times when gods and monsters existed. We probably know that Oedipus answered the Riddle of the Sphinx, or that Perseus, a monster, decapitated Medusa, a hero, for example.
We have lots of different sources; our earliest is probably Homer, or the two poems that we attribute to Homer - The Iliad and The Odyssey, which, in the case of The Iliad, tells the story of two months in the final year of the Trojan War and, in the case of The Odyssey, tells the story of the ten-year journey home from the Trojan War. We also have things like Hesiod’s Theogony, which is roughly contemporary with Homer, and he tells the story of the beginning of time, and the birth of the gods. So, gods, monsters, heroes, heroines, battles – I mean it’s pretty much got it all. It’s a much more accessible sort of myth. I think that’s the reason why Greek myth is so resonant through history in a way that other myth cycles are maybe less prevalent. Human beings are very central to Greek myth and, even when it’s just gods before there are humans, they still behave in a really human way so, it’s a very anthropomorphic or anthropocentric way of looking at the world. I think the reason that they’re very popular today is because they focus our attention on things on a very human level; gods have very human emotions in Greek myths, and there are profound psychological ramifications for all kinds of the conflicts that we see in these myths, and that was obviously recognised by psychotherapy very early on. Freud, famously a huge fan of Greek myth, as a sort of explainer. It’s also partly because classical reception over the last couple of hundred years has tended to mean that people with privilege in European and North American traditions have tended to study Latin and Greek. And perhaps, if they’d all been studying Old Norse, we would have a different way of looking at things. But luckily for me, because I started Latin at 11 and Greek at 14, it worked out.
You’ve written both non-fiction and fiction work that are centred around Greek mythology - could you talk a little bit about the differences between the process of writing these two different types of books? I was also wondering whether or not you feel closer to the fictionalised tales, where there is more of your own voice and creativity in them?
Yeah, it’s weird, isn’t it? I feel exactly the same way. And yet, theoretically, you’d think that the non-fiction would have more of me in it because it’s all written in my voice. But, yes, you’re entirely right. The novels are emotionally ruinous to write, and that’s why I alternate between writing novels and non-fiction. I recover with a nice non-fiction book essentially, where I get to do some research and then tell you all the cool things I found out. And that is what allows me to then go deep into, for example, experiences of women who lose their city in a war and are then enslaved, or the experience of a young woman who is first sexually assaulted, and then physically assaulted, and then decapitated by someone different again. They are quite upsetting stories, at least the ones I choose are. So, Pandora’s Jar was basically my sort of ‘feel better book’ after writing A Thousand Ships, and Divine Might was my recovery book after writing Stone Blind, so now the plan is that I can do another novel.
That’s good to hear, that there’s another novel coming! Could you tell us what that will be about?
I haven’t started yet, but it’s going to be about Medea, so I’m going to swap a series of assaults for child murder. So really, it’s hard to see how this is going to be a happier process… But, you know, we’ll work it out.
In the novels particularly, your characterisation and the relationships you build are so human-centric and incredibly moving, which I think makes it so easy for modern readers to become totally engrossed into the story, even if they don’t have much (or any!) knowledge of the ancient texts.
I think you’re right, and I don’t think they require, or at least they shouldn’t require, any prior knowledge. And I think sometimes people feel that they’re sort of not equal to learning Classics, usually because of something they were told at school – that they weren’t put in the top set, so they weren’t allowed to do Latin, even though Latin is much easier, in my view, than French for example. Not least because you don’t have to speak it, and English people tend to be really shy about speaking other languages; not all English people, but lots. Greek, I admit, is hard, but Latin isn’t, and so, what you get, I think, is the sense of it being withheld. And, to a large extent that’s true. Ancient language teaching in this country is largely in the private sector, so that’s just 7% of students, and there’s a sense therefore that it belongs to an elite. But of course, that’s not the case, this is all our history. This is all our cultural background and, if we don’t have access to it at school, which the vast majority of students don’t – in spite of some amazing teachers making the effort to teach in lunch times and after school because they are passionate about Classics – I think it’s really easy to believe that you’re not good enough for Classics.
And actually, that is entirely the responsibility of the people who are gatekeeping it in my view. But, for example, there’s a huge audience for my Radio 4 show, ‘Stands Up for the Classics’ – we get about 1.6 million listeners each episode. Now, you could argue that that’s just the Radio 4 numbers because people have it on like wallpaper, but it’s been downloaded as a podcast more than three million times, so there is obviously a huge audience for Classics, and I think, in a way, it’s because we’re having to make up for the things people missed out on when they were at school. I’m fiercely conscious of the fact that I was incredibly lucky to get to study the languages, in particular when I was young enough to find them relatively easy - well, easier than I would find them now, for sure. And I think it’s lovely to be able to give Classics to people who didn’t have that same stroke of luck.
Definitely. I do agree and I am lucky because I’m from Cyprus, so I had the chance to learn Greek.
Oh fantastic, which bit?
Nicosia!
Oh, lovely. I’ve got loads of friends there – we would definitely have people in common. There’s this women’s theatre collective in Nicosia called ‘Sezon Gynaikes’ and they adapted my book Ships in 2019. They translated the entire book into Greek and they did it as a one-day performance with 28 women at the Municipal Theatre for the International Festival. I went over, and it was just one of the most incredible things that has ever happened, at least to me. And then they restaged it at the British Museum the following year, literally just as the skies were starting to close at the very end of February 2020.
Oh wow. My mum is very excited that I’m talking to you, and she had told me about how, in primary school, she was taught all the stories, and it was her favourite lesson. But then there was this period of her life when she didn’t really engage with them, especially living in the UK, so it was actually reading your book, Ships, that reignited her interest in the mythology she had learnt as a child.
This is my siren song to Greek Cypriot women as ships. I didn’t realise when I wrote it that I was basically sending up the bat signal for Greek Cypriot women to come and befriend me. But in fact, that’s what I was doing. It’s one of the better side effects of a book, I would say. I’m really, really lucky that I get to build those connections because you don’t know, when you write the book, who will read it. I’m glad I wrote about Cyprus in Divine Might –the Cypriots are getting name-checked!
Amazing! Well, I’ll have to give Divine Might to my mum when I go and see her.
Oh yes, you’ll have to give it to your mum, I’m afraid that is the rule. Did you see the tote bag that goes with it? Your mum should have a tote bag that says ‘Goddess’ on it. And then she’ll look super cool and be the envy of all the other Cypriot women.
She’ll love that. Staying with Divine Might, there was a line that really stuck with me because I think it’s relevant to Greek mythology, but also still applicable today in so many ways, which is: ‘Someone who loses their voice, loses their power.’
Yes! It’s a recurring theme, it’s true.
It made me think about your work in terms of adding the voices and experiences of women into myths that have often been male-centric, as I’ve read about how you felt angry when you were writing Pandora’s Jar.
I did, yeah, I did feel angry, really about Medusa; the Medusa chapter of Pandora just killed me writing it. And I was so angry, I wrote her a whole novel, you know, I was as angry at the end as I was at the beginning. And generally, 10,000 words will cure you of that kind of rage –you would think that, by that point, the rage would have washed away, but I felt as rageful as ever, so I wrote Stone Blind.
Obviously, goddesses have a bit more power, but often, because of the way that patriarchy works, that power is being directed not in an entirely delightful way, and certainly not in an entirely feminist way. I mean, there are cases of men losing their voices, although fewer. Obviously, the Muses have the power to take the voice of a singer, and Artemis is the example that is the most artistically represented, when she takes Actaeon’s voice and turns him into a stag. But generally, if you were to comb your way through Ovid’s Metamorphosis, which is a compendium of Greek mythology and sexual assault essentially, voicelessness is a really common feature. And, you know, there’s a sense of losing power because you lose control, and voice is a way of expressing our desires and our needs. That’s why babies are so angry, you know? Because they have no language to say, ‘I need this and this and this’, and all they can do is just be furious that you haven’t worked it out.
So, I felt very strongly writing Stone Blind that I would give a voice to Medusa who has none because, even I, who spend my whole time thinking about women in Greek myth, hadn’t ever noticed that there isn’t anyone in our ancient sources who she kills. You know, you spend all your time being told she turns people to stone, but who does she kill? Anyone? No one is the answer. Her head is used to turn lots of people to stone after she’s died, but that really isn’t the same thing at all!
And these things just enter into our consciousness in the sense that we all think we know who Medusa is and what she did, but we really don’t. And that’s another reason why I think these books are so incredible because they uncover the truths behind these idioms and phrases that we all say without knowing the truth of the story.
I think that’s right. I think I see the world in a way that it turns out everyone else doesn’t. I don’t sit here and think, how can I insert women into this story? I look at the story and think, ‘Where is the version with women in it? Oh Christ, give it here, I’ll do it.’ It just doesn’t occur to me to look at a story that just has men in it and assume that’s all there is to be told.
I wouldn’t think it about, I don’t know, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, which is a deeply male scenario and I have no problem with that. If you want to write an all-male story that’s as good as Sophocles’ Philoctetes, I’ll be the first to praise that. But, for the most part, look how many stories Euripides gives us about the Trojan War, and they almost all focus on women – seven of his eight extant tragedies of the Trojan War have women as the title characters. That’s not an accident; it’s because he knew that that’s where the drama is – it’s off the battlefield and it’s in the build-up to war and the aftermath of war. And so, it just felt to me that we were missing out; I felt that people were being sold something kind of partial if we didn’t make at least some effort to say, ‘And here is some of the rest of the story…’
It just is the case that, over the last two centuries in Neoclassicism, we’ve prioritised Homer over Quintus Smyrnaeus, for example. But you know, Homer gives us the hypermasculine world of The Iliad and Quintus Smyrnaeus gives us the story of Penthesilea, the Amazon warrior Queen. And, I mean, I love The Iliad; it’s probably my favourite epic poem; it’s probably my favourite poem, full stop. And it is all about men and I don’t feel like I’m somehow betraying the sisterhood by choosing it as a favourite, but I do want the rest of the story as well. It’s like, what’s happening to all these women off the battlefield? It’s a whole world, it’s not just a pinpoint narrative, so being able to fill in some of those gaps and take characters from the shadows and centre them – I’m just really lucky that nobody was doing it before!
When you had decided on the type of narrative you wanted to write, were there any other works of art that inspired you?
I’d read Margaret Atwood’s really brilliant The Penelopiad and I loved it. I loved its sort of bright Dorothy Parker modern but ancient, timeless kind of voice. It’s so funny and brilliant. So, I think that was probably in my mind for sure, but generally, you know, I don’t think so. I came across the Heroides, the Ovid poems that centre women, when I was an undergraduate, and I’d always loved them. They’re letters from the women of Greek myth to their absent menfolk - the first one is from Penelope to, well she calls him Ulysses because it’s Roman, but Odysseus. And they’re so good. And I couldn’t believe I’d had to wait so long to find them. It’s like, I went to a girl’s school, why wasn’t I reading these when I was 16? These are amazing. So, you know, people have been giving voices to women in these myths for two and a half millennia, so it felt like a really cool tradition to be a part of.
And as well as being a writer, you’re also a comedian, so I wanted to ask how your comedy has informed your storytelling and vice versa?
Oh, yeah. Comedians are ruthless editors. That’s the thing. Only poets and advertisers who have to pay for each word think about words with the same weight that comedians do, because even a syllable out of place will take the laugh away or reduce it. So, you’re incredibly vigilant and disciplined in these sorts of matters. So, I edit ruthlessly. When I hand in a first draft, I have probably already edited it, I don’t know, three times. And for the most part, my editor will come back and say, could you add something in rather than could you take something out because I’ve edited it down so much. But yeah, I really like to write skinny and then bulk out. When people say, I write 150,000 words and then took half of it out, I’m like, how much time do you have?
Yes, and the edited down version is always so much better, I think. Even when I edit an interview, I always initially think, ‘I can’t possibly take that out’, but once I do, I realise how much better the shortened version is.
Yeah, and you don’t have to miss the longer version, do you? That’s the thing. I mean, the hardest thing to do is the radio series, because we’ve got 28 minutes and there’s basically 30 seconds to play with. That’s all there is. So, it’s really tight and we’ve done a couple of episodes that I performed live, which means I have to time it absolutely to the button. It’s the most stressful job I do in the year, and I know it’s not brain surgery or anything, but my God, it’s hard. It’s very difficult. It’s like reverse parking a spaceship to time. I don’t know what I was thinking, but I do love doing it, so I must crave the stress, I think.
One of the things I love reading about in all your books is the various dynamics between gods and mortals. Is there any particular relationship between a God and a mortal that you especially enjoyed writing about?
I really love doing Athene and Perseus in Stone Blind because he comes across so badly in that book and that, again, is not my invention. There are examples in the ancient world where he’s depicted as being feeble and not a good hero at all. So, I’m continuing a tradition that is 1600 years old already. But because you only ever see him through the eyes of Athene or interacting with other female, largely immortal characters, like the Graiai, the Hesperides, and later, Medusa, you only see this young man – he’s only 16 – through how these immortal creatures respond to him. And especially Athene, as I write her, is both clever and absolutely lacking in any kind of emotional nuance. Again, this is a tradition that dates back to Homer where gods in general are squabbily and there’s something really joyous about her. I think I’m like her, so maybe that’s why I like her so much but, for example, if she’s trying to explain something to someone and they disagree with her, she generally just doesn’t bother to try anymore. She just sort of withdraws and it’s like she literally can’t be bothered to tell you why you’re wrong. There’s something so delightful about a female character who is so open about that contempt.
So, the relationship that Athena and Perseus have in Stone Blind is... I mean, technically they’re half siblings; they share a father in Zeus but the idea that she would ever acknowledge that or that he could even begin to understand it – it was just a joy to write these two worlds crashing into each other. For Athene, the idea that you could invest even one nanosecond of energy into understanding or caring about something that will be dead in about ten minutes anyway is madness. And you know, when I was first talking about the book, people said, ‘Oh, Perseus comes out of it really badly’. And I said yes because, to her, his concerns are so petty. It would be like you or I investing a lot in an ant. So, to her, he just seems like a pointless idiot. And it was joyous writing it, I’m afraid.
So, apart from sections that are just enjoyable to write, are there any particular characters or stories or even dynamics between characters that have a really special place in your heart?
Oh, Cassandra in Ships was a really important character to write. I always think she’s the Greek myth character for our times. You know, she is what it feels like to be standing here while people say, ‘Well, we can’t do something about climate change because it would be expensive and difficult’, and you’re like, ‘Dude, look on the news!’ So yeah, writing Cassandra was very painful, but I loved writing her. And every Athene scene in Stone Blind was similarly joyous.
As for Divine Might, I think I probably had the most fun writing the chapter on Hestia, who is the invisible goddess. She is the older sister of Zeus, Poseidon, Hades, Hera, and it’s like, how did we lose her? She was so central to Greek and especially Roman religious worship, and she just gets lost. And there’s virtually no material about her from the ancient world – there’s almost no Classical reception of her and almost no version of her in any modern source. So, I thought, ‘Okay, I reckon I can get 10,000 words out of trying to find out where she went’. So, her chapter was a real voyage of discovery for me.
And writing Demeter as well. I’ve long disliked the contemporary tendency to make the story of Persephone a romantic one. It isn’t romantic, it’s trafficking. It’s trafficking and it’s forced marriage. And he isn’t a god who loves too much. And she isn’t complicit in her own assault, and it’s not okay. So, Demeter, a woman who literally threatens to starve the world to death until she gets her daughter back, is the mother that I think all of us should have. So, I really, really loved writing her. And the Homeric hymn to Demeter, which the chapter is very closely based on, is also an extraordinary story of a manuscript surviving because it was thought to be lost for a really long time, and then the only copy of it to come to us from the ancient world was supposed to have been in some imperial archives in Moscow, but it was found by a man who claimed to have found it on the floor of a pig shed in Russia… So, we are so lucky to have it. You always worry as a classicist that we lost somewhere between 97% and 99% of ancient literature, but every now and then, there’s a story like that and you think, wow. Somehow, we have the Homeric hymn to Demeter, and it’s just mesmerising and wonderful.
As my last question on Greek myths, I wanted to ask you to speak directly to anyone who’s reading this interview who has, up until this point, felt as though mythology retellings aren’t for them – if you had an elevator pitch to convince them to begin exploring this world, what would you say?
I would tell them that there are probably other myth cycles they can invest their time in, which would be interesting and rewarding, but they wouldn’t find the human condition explored in the same detail, particularly the emotions and psychology of human beings, anywhere else. The unit of currency of Greek myth, and particularly in Greek tragedy as it encounters Greek myth, is human life. Of course, you could be less narcissistic and feel like you only wanted to look at creation myths and how the world was made, and that’s fair enough, but if you want to understand what it is to be human, there are much worse places to begin than Greek myth.
They don’t have a language yet for psychological phenomena, as we would call them, so, what you find is ways of explaining these behaviours through myth. So, for example, if I was falling in love with an incredibly handsome man across the street – as I might well do – we would probably say it was an internal thing, you know, that I fell in love. I’m active in this process, I chose to love this person, or desire them at the very least. And maybe, you know, if it were the kind of balladeer songwriter that I would have thrown my knickers at when I was a teenager, we might say that the object of our affections was the creator of it. We’d say, ‘Well, they were so beautiful, I couldn’t help but fall in love with them’. But what we wouldn’t do is what the Greeks did, which is to see it as something fully external, that Aphrodite or Eros afflict you with desire, and that’s why you suddenly experienced these feelings for another person. And there’s an argument to be made that that robs you of responsibility, although that’s not an argument that the Greeks would have recognised, as you’re always responsible for your actions no matter how many gods get involved. So, I suppose, my elevator pitch would be that, if you want to truly understand yourself, there are many worse places than Greek myth to begin.
Sounds good! And I have to be honest, I love your books and have read a lot of other retellings, but I do forget the names and the relationships between the many gods and goddesses, but to me, that’s not where I find the joy in these books. To me, they’re just incredible stories about timeless emotions.
Exactly. And also, there’s not an exam! You know, people have been emailing me or coming to live shows and telling me that they hadn’t passed the 11+ or that they were put in the bottom set, and they have carried the weight of not being ‘good enough’ for the Classics through their whole lives. I have actually, more than once, met people who retired from their job in their 60s and only then felt able to pursue their passion and study Latin or Greek. Both my parents are retired teachers and I know that some students can be really annoying, but nobody has the right to make a child feel like they’re not good enough for a subject. Not ever. So yes, some of the words are really long, and it’s not easy always, but that’s okay. It’s okay to not find it easy and pursue it anyway. It belongs to you. Just because you can’t spell it, it doesn’t mean it’s not yours.
And last but not least, do you judge a book by its cover?
Yeah, definitely – well, sometimes. I judged the Booker Prize in 2013, so I read so many books in a very short space of time, and not all of them had covers, and I realised that it’s definitely the case that you’re swayed by a cover. I am swayed by covers. If I think a book looks like my kind of book, I will definitely be drawn to it. But the interesting thing is that, after judging the Booker, I did the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, and you suddenly realise how different covers are across the world. And you’re like, ‘Oh wow, my book looks so angry in this country. And here, it looks so nice and pretty’. So, you just can’t always tell what different people take from the work until you see the cover and, even then, you’re still judging someone else’s cultural appreciation of a cover, of an artwork. But yeah, I’m always really overjoyed when you see a cover and you’re like, that’s so beautiful, I really want to own that book, I want to have that object. Absolutely. I’m swayed by these things.
