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.

Making an effort to post a review every Friday!

Circe by Madeline Miller is an imagining of several mythological tales from the perceptive of one of the more notable witches in classics, focusing on Circe’s motivations, isolation on Aeaeae and interactions with various other figures from myth. Obviously, notably, with Odysseus himself.

I am a nerd.

I am a …I am a classics nerd.

I loved this portrayal and interpretation of Odysseus and his personality. I was surprised, given how much I liked this interpretation of Odysseus as a character that I then liked Telemachus more. The way each character is humanized and contended with–there is such a tender and careful amount of thought given to each character’s portrayal–a person in these circumstances, with these accomplishments, with these constraints and flaws–the portrayals feel very genuine and realistic and in a way definitive.

The stories and myths touched on and how they’re woven together is masterful and carefully unites many strands of myth which are usually presented as broken threads.

I found the story telling unpretentious, accessible, and masterful in creating the atmosphere that lends itself to its character’s logic and behavior. I think that’s something which people don’t appreciate enough in well written works; the audience not only following a character’s line of reasoning but being so embroiled in the created atmosphere that they agree with it.

I generally tend not to review books that I wouldn’t recommend, but this book is really special to me in its portrayal of femininity. Motherhood especially is shown as being unglamorous, difficult, and largely managed alone. Sexuality is often violent and not treated as something aspired to or an end goal but as another feature of life and of relationships–her relationships with various characters, though sexual, are built on respect and intellect. Her first relationship which ends poorly does so because it is built on attraction; moving forward she is more shrewd, more clever, and the relationships become more meaningful. Her competition with other females, particularly among her family or with Scylla, demonstrate the toxicity of strictly held feminine ideals. Each explore the different ways in which womanhood is weaponized and women are forced to compete with each other. Once she develops more confidence in herself and throws off a large portion of the role that she had as a demigoddess after banished to Aeaeae, she cultivates positive relationships with the nymphs and other scorned daughters sent to her. Aeaeae becomes a sanctuary for women who do not fit into a strict patriarchical ideal. And finally Aeaeae is both home and prison as the most important relationship which Circe develops is with herself. Being able to be contented in quietness, competent in self defense against the violence of men, in the labors of survival is one of the things which makes this character so compelling. She repeatedly does not back down from challenges, and she does not do so with feigned grace or the dignity of Victorian manufactured femininity but with the shit stained bluntness of: I will survive this because I must.