Filtrer
Picador Uk
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In Divine Might Natalie Haynes, author of the bestselling Pandora''s Jar, returns to the world of Greek myth and this time she examines the role of the goddesses.
We meet Athene, who sprang fully formed from her father''s head: goddess of war and wisdom, guardian of Athens. We run with Artemis, goddess of hunting and protector of young girls (apart from those she decides she wants as a sacrifice). Here is Aphrodite, goddess of sex and desire - there is no deity more determined and able to make you miserable if you annoy her. And then there''s the queen of all the Olympian gods: Hera, Zeus''s long-suffering wife, whose jealousy of his dalliances with mortals, nymphs and goddesses lead her to wreak elaborate, vicious revenge on those who have wronged her.
We also meet Demeter, goddess of agriculture and mother of the kidnapped Persephone, we sing the immortal song of the Muses and we warm ourselves with Hestia, goddess of the hearth and sacrificial fire. The Furies carry flames of another kind - black fires of vengeance for those who incur their wrath.
These goddesses are as mighty, revered and destructive as their male counterparts. Isn''t it time we looked beyond the columns of a ruined temple to the awesome power within? -
''Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!'' - Margaret Atwood The Greek myths are among the world''s most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the remarkable women at the heart of these ancient stories. Stories of gods and monsters are the mainstay of epic poetry and Greek tragedy, from Homer to Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, from the Trojan War to Jason and the Argonauts. And still, today, a wealth of novels, plays and films draw their inspiration from stories first told almost three thousand years ago. But modern tellers of Greek myth have usually been men, and have routinely shown little interest in telling women''s stories. And when they do, those women are often painted as monstrous, vengeful or just plain evil. But Pandora - the first woman, who according to legend unloosed chaos upon the world - was not a villain, and even Medea and Phaedra have more nuanced stories than generations of retellings might indicate. Now, in Pandora''s Jar: Women in the Greek Myths , Natalie Haynes - broadcaster, writer and passionate classicist - redresses this imbalance. Taking Pandora and her jar (the box came later) as the starting point, she puts the women of the Greek myths on equal footing with the menfolk. After millennia of stories telling of gods and men, be they Zeus or Agamemnon, Paris or Odysseus, Oedipus or Jason, the voices that sing from these pages are those of Hera, Athena and Artemis, and of Clytemnestra, Jocasta, Eurydice and Penelope.
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In Divine Might Natalie Haynes, author of the bestselling Pandora''s Jar, returns to the world of Greek myth and this time she examines the role of the goddesses.
We meet Athene, who sprang fully formed from her father''s head: goddess of war and wisdom, guardian of Athens. We run with Artemis, goddess of hunting and protector of young girls (apart from those she decides she wants as a sacrifice). Here is Aphrodite, goddess of sex and desire - there is no deity more determined and able to make you miserable if you annoy her. And then there''s the queen of all the Olympian gods: Hera, Zeus''s long-suffering wife, whose jealousy of his dalliances with mortals, nymphs and goddesses lead her to wreak elaborate, vicious revenge on those who have wronged her.
We also meet Demeter, goddess of agriculture and mother of the kidnapped Persephone, we sing the immortal song of the Muses and we warm ourselves with Hestia, goddess of the hearth and sacrificial fire. The Furies carry flames of another kind - black fires of vengeance for those who incur their wrath.
These goddesses are as mighty, revered and destructive as their male counterparts. Isn''t it time we looked beyond the columns of a ruined temple to the awesome power within?
