Antigone Rising by Helen Morales

Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

This book was suggested to me by my sister based on a reading she’d had from it in a Classics course in her undergrad. I had been trying to think of a book that I had read that could finish out my mythology month that didn’t feel….overdone. There are plenty of amazing adaptations and re-envisionings of what we call classical literature—which frankly births from an extremely exclusive swath of location and time period and speaks to our fixation.

Classic should apply to more than one coastline.

This is one of the central arguments of Antigone Rising: The Subversive Power of Ancient Myths. We’re in a bit of a bind with the Greeks and Romans. We both look back to them for credibility in the duration of our cultural touchstones and we—idealistically, we realize that they were remarkably flawed.

Most of our modern interpretations of classical myths are heavily romanticized—which, frankly, the root word of romance is Roman. Our understanding is heavily through a pro-Roman, pro-Greek lens.

Brought to you by the battle of Thermopylae! May we present: centuries of narrowly defined social expectations.

I would guarantee that a given white cismale that I went to college with and sat in a theater watching 300 with could tell you wonderful things about the men of Sparta which glorify their warrior lifestyle. I know many people who gleefully took courses in Roman warfare. If I asked a single one of those men the role of the Gynaeconomi —I’d bet even money that they don’t know. And because it doesn’t effect them, they likely aren’t going to go too deep into investigating it.

That’s the pro-Roman bias.

Even in briefly looking up some supporting material before I wrote this review, there’s very little about the murky underbelly of Greek and Roman culture—yeah, believe me, whatever you think; it can get worse—that isn’t heavily blockaded behind paywalls.

But if you would care to dive deeper, I found Antigone Rising to be a highly accessible, well thought introduction to feminist topics laden within mythology. And given our propensity to look back to the Greeks and Romans as cultural touchstones inexorable from our society, it is certainly a stone worth overturning.

Consider, just briefly, the controversy surrounding Ovid’s Metamorphoses. I’m going to pick on this one because it’s personal. I like Ovid. That alone is controversial. I remember from my Latin days how Ovid was something the boys snickered about because of the depictions of rape and bestiality and all manner of frenzy which the sixteenth century-to-present ‘westerners’ went on to cherry pick for their personal use. But as the argument is made in Antigone Rising, Metamorphoses was a deeply political book. Removing it from the political atmosphere of Augustus we fail to see how these allusions to Apollo raping virgins were criticisms of the empire—not religious text. Ovid purposefully chose gods and mythical figures which the empire had aligned themselves with in symbolism to debase and villainize as a critique of the end of republicanism.

This is a huge issue in interpretation of ancient text, particularly when you dip your toe into looking at who has been allowed to do the interpreting for the past few centuries. If we look at Ovid with absolutely no context, we can interpret a glorification of rape, of sexism, of many things which don’t align with political or historical evidence.

Back quickly to the gynaeconomi—that term refers specifically to the magistrates assigned to police women’s behavior, dress, and public lives in Athens. Morales discusses the gunaikonomoi still being a topic of Oppian Law which was disputed as unnecessary by Cicero—and I use this as example of how we today cherry pick our roman heroes.

My latin teacher was obsessed with Cicero. Keekarooo. Her beloved.

“And let us not set a prefect over women, in the fashion of the elected office among the Greeks,” her false feminist agenda might have read. But Cicero’s quote ends, “but let there be a censor, to teach husbands to control their wives.”

The same cherry picking is brought up and lingered on in an essay about weight loss and Hippocrates. Particularly in diet culture, Hippocrates quotes surface which are often contradictory, sometimes to the point of being meaningless, and neglect to say that Hippocrates’ wisdoms about not being fat are sandwiched in between advice about rubbing goat shit on your head.

It’s a good introductory book. I’d read more of it.