The Problem with Greek Myth Retellings

Hello all! This has got FAR more views than I expected, wow! Thank you so much for the many kind, thoughtful comments. I'm very glad to know I'm not alone in my concerns about some Greek mythic retellings. (This video was also a mission to edit, so apologies for glitches, clumsy cuts and misspellings.) In the video, I had a section about Katee Robert's Neon Gods, which I've now cut out. I wanted to discuss my concerns about Greek mythology being used as a selling point for books which, when you read them, can't really justify themselves as mythic retellings. However, for a good portion of that section I was pedantically nitpicking the world building and plot, which is a totally unfair way to judge a book which is a loose reimagining, not a retelling.  I'd also like to make an amendment to the final section of the video. I want to be clear: non-Greek writers are (at least in my opinion) well within their right to write about Greek mythology. However, I believe myths should be retold with due respect and care, especially in light of Greece’s history of colonisation. It disappoints me that many recent retellings market themselves as fixing, amending, or correcting myths (‘telling the untold story of so-and-so…’), and yet often seem to misunderstand or misrepresent their source material. Myths are wonderful, magical pieces of history, and to retell them takes not only skill as a storyteller, but respect and inquisitiveness as a historian. My concern is not that Greek myths are being widely retold, but that they’re being retold in a manner that diminishes the complexity and often strong female voices within the original myths. The marketing of many of these retellings depends on framing the women of the original myths as ‘silenced,’ which is often just not true, and seems a particular shame given these novels are introducing a wide new readership to Greek myths. As a writer, I firmly believe that questioning our right to tell certain kinds of stories leads to a deeper, richer and more complex engagement with our subject matter — and so I don’t raise Greece’s more recent history as a reason not to retell Greek mythology, but rather as a reminder that these myths arrive to us with the complex baggage of history, adding another layer of complexity when retelling them. (The perfectionist in me wants to take this video down, as I don't feel I expressed this point well enough. For now I'll keep it up, but thank you for reading this!) I’m debating whether it might be worth doing a follow-up video to this one, as there’s a lot of stuff I could have discussed in more detail. If there are any topics you’d like me to discuss further, or think I mishandled in this video, please do reply!

Why can’t people write about Eros and Psyche if they want a ‘feminist’ retelling? This girl literally goes on many trails and tribulations to win her husband back.

Demeter is so misunderstood by modern audiences! Like, how ironic is it that so called feminist retellings villainise the woman who challenges the normality of women being kidnapped to become unwilling brides??

"a viral tiktok dark romance retelling of the myth of hades and persephone" there is not a comforting word in that sentence

i NEED writers to let persephone and hades go 😭

i feel like the reason we see so many greek myth retelling novels these days is because a lot of the people who were kids when Percy Jackson came out are now adults and seem to want a "grown up" version of these books in a sense, but I feel like Percy Jackson worked not only because it was so novel but because it didn't directly focus on the gods themselves and instead their demigod children, which allowed the author to maybe explore some themes without completely changing what the myths were about, as you mention.

Comforting to know that even when our bones are dust and names nearly forgotten, Girlbossification still comes for us all.

My least favorite thing about any and every “retelling” of Persephone and Hades is that they do not think about why someone would make this a myth. They do not think about death taking a daughter too young and a mother so furious she would rage against nature itself to get back the daughter she lost. They do not think about death knowing this young innocent girl should not be here so death will try to treat her as kindly as they can. They think only of the stories but not of the domains that these myths represent. The experiences that had to be for these stories to be here.

Fantastic video, I also think that part of why all the new Hades/Persephone “love story” retellings miss the point is because for a long time in classical Greece (mainly Athens I think?) girls were often married off very young to older men, something we would consider to be child marriage today. The grief and pain that Demeter felt from having her daughter taken away from her was real to ancient mothers. In erasing her story, it erases the trauma and real story of these ancient mothers and daughters.

I don't like the "cultural appropriation" argument because thousands of years of art would never exist if people didn't get inspired by the stories and cultures of other people.

thank you for talking about how modern adaptations of the persephone myth so often villanize demeter almost to prop up hades and it baffles me that there's no 'feminist retelling' of demeter's fight to get her daughter back. what makes this story different from all the others that are being retold?

A club at my school managed to organize a video call with Madeline Miller where we could ask her questions. She explained that, when reading the Odyssey, she was a little disappointed by how Circe was only in a few chapters, so in her book Circe she made it so that Odysseus was only around for a few chapters. You mentioning how most of the retellings are the women talking about the men in the myths reminded me of how all i can remember about the book Circe is her puttering about the small island she's exiled to and her reactions to visitors and the world outside of here changing. The book is almost entirely about her solitude and I kind of like that a lot

I'm only 15 minutes in and I already find it baffling that a book called A Thousand Ships isn't actually CENTERED on Helen of Troy. Like...why would you not????

“Though the Greek society was intensely patriarchal, the myths they told centered female characters time and again. It's one of the great dichotomies that lies at the heart of Hellenic history. If women in Ancient Greece were such as marginalized class of people ,why did powerful women figure so large in myth?" "My worry is that in this flood of mythic retellings, they add nothing substantive but rely on name recognition alone." When a video essay is worded and hit so well it almost made me shed a tear. Thank you for this.

"The women who are truly silenced are the ones we don't hear about." Wow. That hit hard! Fantastic video, I'm so glad the youtube algorithm actually recommended me something good!!!

Penelope hearing a 100% accurate retelling of Odysseus' travels undermines so much of her character and of the Odyssey itself. Most people when asked about the Odyssey could maybe tell you maybe about the cyclops, lotus eaters, the underworld and such. Those are the juicy bits, the actiony stuff that ends up in most adaptations. I was among most people thinking those juicy bits took up the majority of the story, with Odysseus reclaiming his throne as an afterthought. In reality all those iconic scenes are flashbacks near the middle, character backstory to explain how Odysseus got to where he is. The Odyssey spends the bulk of its time on Ithaca, it's more a political drama than anything and Penelope is at the center of it all. The burden she bears is that she gets to decide who the king of Ithaca will be. If she remarries than that man will be king, her son will be killed, Odysseus' legacy will be destroyed, and she loses any power she once wielded. If a man comes to Ithaca claiming to be Odysseus there is an immense amount of pressure on her to make sure it's really him. For her to falsely recognize an imposter would be just as perilous as giving the throne to one of the suitors. The fact that she truly does not know what happened to Odysseus and cannot know for certain if the mysterious stranger who arrives in the palace is him drives the tension for the third act. For her to hear what her husband is up to as it is happening flies in the face of all of this. The heart of the story is lost for the sake of modern commentary.

Isn’t it funny how all the “feminist” retellings completely ignore the actual feminist messages you can occasionally pull from the stories and either make these ancient heroines rude bitches or just give them a hot powerful man to vicariously feel powerful through

The Iliad also never blames Helen for the war, Priam tells her it's not her fault, and that if anybody is to blamed it's the gods

I think there's also a bias towards medieval history to portray it as neglectful of female voices and want to reinvent it for modern women. A lot might not be as well known as male figures and writers but they won't get anywhere always being a shadow to well known male figures. I'd probably be interested in a story of Penelope having to negotiate with different suitors who mirror the monsters Odysseus weaves through but I care less of her just hearing about what her husband has been doing and then commenting on that over her personal life or getting jealous.

Winter Harvest by Ioanna Papadopoulou is a retelling of Hades and Persephone from Demeter's perspective and very faithfully follows the Homeric telling. It is also written by a Greek author, and hasn't seen nearly enough love. Recommending another retelling may be missing the point of the video, but I wanted to put this one out there.