Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths(60)

Let’s just take a moment to look at this catalogue of unpleasantness. Theseus stands accused of being something rather worse than a bad husband, many times over (although he certainly is that. I cannot be alone in wondering if he consecutively marries women named Periboia and Pheriboia because it’s less effort to remember such similar names). He abducts Anaxo and later Helen: these are not even euphemised in the Greek. Theseus is a serial rapist, a serial taker of war brides. He doesn’t abduct the daughters of Sinis and Cercyon, but he nonetheless rapes them after killing their fathers. And he takes them, Plutarch makes this quite clear, by force – bia. This is rape. Helen was either seven or ten when Theseus abducted her, you may remember. In some versions of the story, she has given birth to his daughter before she is reclaimed by her brothers.

And Plutarch makes a concise but vital point at the beginning of this list. These ‘other stories’ about Theseus’ violent sexual history haven’t been shown onstage. Professor Edith Hall has argued with characteristic scholarly vigour that she loathes Euripides’ Hippolytus, because it legitimizes rape myths.10 By dramatizing a story in which a woman fabricates a claim of rape, we give vastly more prominence to Phaedra’s wrongdoing than we do to, for example, Theseus’ succession of rapes, forced marriages, kidnaps and child rape, which are still largely undramatized today. Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love – a brutal retelling of the myth that culminates in Hippolytus being castrated and disembowelled, while Theseus rapes his stepdaughter and then slits her throat – is a rare exception. Even Plutarch can see that there is an issue with which stories are told and which are not, and he is writing the best part of two millennia before women will even get the vote. There are a few stories of women making up accusations of rape in Greek myth, Phaedra and Stheneboea being the two best-known. But there are literally hundreds of examples of rape: mostly of women, occasionally also of young men.

Translations and retellings – particularly of Greek myths for children – tend to gloss over this uncomfortable fact. Of course, no one wants to traumatize a child learning about the Greeks for the first time, but the problem with sanitizing these stories is that we develop a skewed perception. When we read that a satyr is attempting to ‘carry off’ a nymph, to ‘seize’ a naiad, we are reading euphemisms.

To look at a specific and notorious example, Hades often ‘abducts’ Persephone, who is eventually reclaimed by her grieving mother, Demeter, for part of the year. The remainder must be spent in the Underworld because Persephone has eaten pomegranate seeds during her stay, so she has to return to Hades every year. This is the price for having consumed food in the realm of the dead. Even people who know very little Greek myth usually know this story: it is one we often learn as children. But the word ‘abduct’ tells only part of the story. It can make the whole encounter sound more like an adventure from which Persephone is partially rescued, and less like a sustained sexual assault and forced marriage. We focus on the detail of the pomegranate, which makes Persephone complicit or even partly responsible for her own continued and repeated imprisonment. Yet if we read the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, we would see that, in this, one of the earliest tellings of Persephone’s story, Hades tricks her into eating: he gives her the pomegranate lathrē – secretly.11 She is not told that it could cost her her freedom. Only when she is reunited with her mother Demeter does she discover the consequences: she explains that Hades secretly put the fruit in her mouth, compelled her, by force, to taste it.12 This image of a young woman being force-fed by her jailor to assure her further imprisonment is genuinely shocking. The Homeric Hymn also tells us that Zeus connived with Hades for the latter to take Persephone against her will. There is no way of reading these words and thinking Persephone was not raped. ‘Against her will’ is quite specific. And Zeus is Persephone’s father, Hades her uncle. Two all-powerful male gods, between them responsible for both the world of the living and the world of the dead, conspiring against a young woman to traffic her to the Underworld, rape her, and then hide the truth from her mother for as long as they can: that is a more accurate, if less delightful, way of describing the same story.

Just to be clear, I am not suggesting for a moment that the ancient world isn’t packed with its own misogyny: it is. The literature and art which survive today were created in highly patriarchal societies which gave enormous power to a small group of wealthy men. But all too often it is the misogyny of more recent times that we are reading. The Homeric Hymn tells us that Persephone is forced to eat against her will; it does not gloss over this element of the story. And yet modern storytellers routinely ignore it. Let’s look again at how Theseus fares when his exploits are recounted in Roger Lancelyn Green’s much-loved Tales of the Greek Heroes, published in 1958. He cheerfully tells us about Theseus killing Sinis and Cercyon (and other ‘miscreants’). But he makes no mention of the rape of these men’s daughters, which Plutarch knew was worth including in his description. For more modern authors, it seems that murdering villains is fine, but raping their daughters must be overlooked. Of course, we might well feel that a classic children’s book is no place for rape: I don’t particularly disagree. But these myths are full of violence and we should at least ask why it is the violence against women that is removed in order to make our heroes uncomplicated adventurers.

Because that is certainly what happens to Theseus in Green’s version. When we come to Ariadne on Naxos, Dionysus sees her and makes her fall into a magic sleep, ‘and when she awoke, she remembered nothing about Theseus, nor how she came to Naxos, but willingly became the bride of Dionysus.’13 That is – you will forgive me if I am damaging your childhood delight in these stories – enormously convenient for Theseus. We might all wish our bad behaviour could be so easily forgotten. A page later, the new king of Crete sends Theseus ‘Phaedra in marriage, so that in spite of his loss of Ariadne, he still married a daughter of Minos.’ Well, thank goodness. I was beginning to worry that Theseus was the real victim here.