British woman reinvents Greek mythology – 08/26/2023 – Reinaldo José Lopes

A few months ago, I had the weirdest experience: laughing alone while washing dishes, listening to a podcast about, believe it or not, the “Iliad” and the “Odyssey”. Yeah, those poems by Homer in ancient Greek.

The reason for my hilarious breakdown was listening to British classicist Natalie Haynes, host of the podcast, portraying in a peculiar way the effect caused by the hero Odysseus (or Ulysses, as he is better known) on the life expectancy of almost everyone around him.

“One of the main lessons of Greek mythology is that, if you’re a man and want to stay alive, it’s best to get away from Odysseus as soon as possible”, she laughs – in fact, the amount of companions (and enemies) of the hero to end up in Hades over the course of the “Odyssey” while he alone escapes unscathed is a portentous business.

In addition to starring in the podcast, Haynes is the author of a series of books on Greco-Roman mythology and the world of antiquity, two of which —”Pandora’s Jar” and “Petrifying Gaze” (this one, of course, on the myth de Medusa)—just arrived in Brazil. The contagious and biting good humor is one of the main ingredients of her work. But the other part of Haynes’ recipe is an almost irrepressible rage at injustices ancient and modern, at the way Greco-Roman myths and culture were and are used to promote misogyny, inequality and illusions of cultural superiority.

“I think my mix is ​​the same,” Haynes told me over the phone. “In fact, I don’t separate things much: I don’t see why we shouldn’t see the funny side even in tragic situations, or why it wouldn’t make sense to have fun with our indignation.”

Putting it this way, you might end up thinking that the author’s work is nothing more than deconstruction for deconstruction’s sake. Nothing could be further from the truth. Haynes employs all the resources of his portentous erudition—from the analysis of original literary texts to the shrewd examination of vase paintings, sculptures, inscriptions—to see what lies behind the many layers of the Greco-Roman mythological tradition.

The result is capable of surprising even those who grew up with these stories. It is possible that you were surprised, for example, by the title of one of the books I mentioned above. Yes, the name is really “The Jug of Pandora”, and not “The Box of Pandora”, as we are used to hearing.

According to the myth, it is the container that contained all the evils of the world, which Pandora, the first woman, would have inadvertently opened, thus condemning humanity to face forever misfortunes such as the mumps, the mosquito Aedes aegypti and the university sertanejo.

It so happens, however, that we are facing one of those historical translation errors. The original term for the container is “pithos”, a kind of tall ceramic jar with a narrow bottom that was very easy to overturn, as shown by the many shards in Greek archaeological sites. During the Renaissance, the scholar Erasmus of Rotterdam seems to have confused “pithos” with “pyxis” (which was indeed a term for “box”). Poor Pandora thus came to be described as a snooper who deliberately opened the box of ills, rather than someone who bumped into a jar practically made for squishing!

Similar surprises await the reader when Haynes turns to address the trajectory of figures such as Helen of Troy, Penelope (the wife of Odysseus/Ulysses —spoiler: perhaps she was not as patient and/or blindly faithful as she is usually portrayed) and and, of course, the dreaded Medusa, a figure far more tragic than monstrous after all.

For her, these narratives are more alive than ever. “We ended up forgetting that, in recent decades, the plays of Greek playwrights on episodes of mythology have been staged more frequently than the golden age of Athens”, she ponders. Haynes’s work is the best possible introduction to the light and dark legacy of these stories.

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