Who Owns the Greek Myths? – by Katerina Cosgrove
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Novelistic retelling of Greek mythology has exploded in recent years: Rick Riordan of Percy Jackson series fame and Madeline Miller’s and Pat Barker’s bestsellers drawing upon the legacy of older writers such as Mary Renault and Marion Zimmer Bradley. For me, a Greek-Australian writer, there is something about these books that feels disorienting.
These works are literary, researched, respectful and probably well-meaning. I’ve taken pleasure in reading Miller’s Circe, Barker’s The Silence of the Girls and The Women of Troy, as well as Renault’s The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea. Yet these books are written by privileged people with no small measure of power, the products of elite universities and classical educations. These writers have not publicly acknowledged consulting with Greek scholars or spent time living in Greece. Riordan taught history at high school. Miller studied Ancient Greek and Latin at Brown University, and Barker completed a degree at the London School of Economics. As far as I can tell, they experience these foundational myths at a remove. On the other hand, I’m wary of jumping on a cultural appropriation bandwagon without nuance or subtlety. But I do wonder how far we need to go to ensure that our interpretation of these ancient myths is ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ and whether this should apply to everyone.
“I do wonder how far we need to go to ensure that our interpretation of these ancient myths is ‘authentic’ or ‘true’ and whether this should apply to everyone.”
The 2020 controversy over Jeanine Cummins’s bestseller American Dirt – penned by a non-Mexican and littered with cartel stereotypes, inaccuracies and racist blunders – has spurred me to ponder this hotly contested issue. In one extreme camp is writer Lionel Shriver, who claimed in her controversial 2016 speech: ‘We fiction writers have to preserve the right to wear many hats – including sombreros.’ I don’t agree with Shriver, nor do I fully disagree. I don’t have definitive answers, but I think the questions deserve to be asked with more rigour. There are plenty of Celtic, Saxon, Germanic and Norse myths for Western writers to engage with. So why don’t they? Is there an #ownvoices hashtag for Greek writers? Maybe there should be.
If writers are not Greek, not part of Greece’s distinct land, sea, light and air, I wonder how they understand the mortals, gods and goddesses they are writing about. I question how they engage with the original sources and whether they sometimes misrepresent them without lived experience of Greek history and without Greek ancestors. I wonder if it’s easier to inadvertently trivialise, simplify and dumb down the philosophies, rituals and mindsets of these ancient cultures, homogenising, creating cliches and tired tropes. The Greek gods are not benign, disembodied cartoon characters. They are powerfully symbolic, not simplistic. Awe-inspiring, frightening, unpredictable. I can’t escape the obvious parallels between this deliberate strip-mining of Greek culture, Lord Elgin stealing the Parthenon Marbles and the failure of the Greek government to repatriate them from the British Museum. You could say the issues become more complex when you consider that the Ancient Greeks themselves were also colonisers, as modern Greeks then became the colonised, first by Romans, Ottomans, then Venetians, the British and the Germans.
“Is this use of a particular culture’s mythologies acceptable, when Greeks are still reeling from the effects of the Civil War, the generals’ junta and the economic crisis? When does the unknown and unknowable state of being inspired by these myths become cultural appropriation?”
Is this use of a particular culture’s mythologies acceptable, when Greeks are still reeling from the effects of the Civil War, the generals’ junta and the economic crisis? When does the unknown and unknowable state of being inspired by these myths become cultural appropriation? This blithe retelling can be damaging or insensitive, even devalue the authentic original cultures and religions of Ancient Greece. And to those who say our entire Western civilisation is a by-product of these worldviews, that these universal stories belong to all of us, there is a strong counter-argument. Polytheism is in fact a living religion. Today, there are still practitioners of the ancient religions of Greece: Hellenic pagans throughout Greece and the world. I’m one of them. Hecate of the crossroads is one of my patron goddesses. I have statues of Hygeia on my desk as I write, looking over my mental and physical health. Demeter, Hestia, Pan, Apollo and Dionysos figure largely in my family’s seasonal festivals and gatherings, and in the local area of my ancestral Greek village.
Okay, I hear you say. But how does anyone, even a modern Greek, get into the mindset of an Ancient Greek or Minoan, Mycenaean or Trojan ancestor? Any writer must try to come as close as possible to the source of the time and place they are writing about. Ancient Greek history is far removed from modern Greek culture, but many aspects of my heritage have been informed by the ancients. Every writer has the right to attempt to enter the mind of the other, but it can be a precarious undertaking. For my 2013 novel Bone Ash Sky I wrote in the points of view of many characters: Turkish, Armenian, Syrian, Lebanese. I hope I succeeded in what I was setting out to do. If I was embarking on the same book today, I wouldn’t have gone down that path in the same way, if at all. We learn. We humble ourselves and vow to do better.
If these writers co-opt Greek oral histories, handed down from mouth to mouth and generation to generation, I don’t see them leaving any room for minority Greek writers, within Greece and in the diaspora, to tell their own stories and to have any hope of getting them published and garnering attention. My Greek publisher, the oldest house in the country, is struggling to stay afloat in the new Greece. Greek writers can’t get published. Maybe the Greek myths don’t belong only to the Greeks. Yet I wonder why the international publishing industry chooses these particular books to champion, white writers writing for white audiences – a structural issue that I can’t begin to unravel here. Greece has suffered from many waves of colonisation, and this feels like the latest.
I’m not saying these writers should not have written these books. The West has always appropriated Greek cultural heritage for its own purposes. The easy aspects are often celebrated while the marginalisation of Greek peoples – both ancient and modern – is rendered invisible. I am saying, though, that we should be thoughtful and humble, listening and approaching any culture’s myths with a healthy dose of respect, even dread and wonder. The Greek gods would be justly pleased by this, I think. ▼
Image: Hert Niks
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