She features, too, in the story of the Minotaur: Pasiphae, wife of King Minos and mother of Phaedra, Ariadne and the Minotaur (fathered, of course, by a sacred bull), is Circe’s sister. Others will recall that Circe - Medea’s aunt, the sister of her father, Aeetes - cleansed Medea and Jason of their crimes, as they fled Colchis with the Golden Fleece and murdered Medea’s brother. Those familiar with the “Odyssey” will of course recall the wanderer’s visit to her island Aiaia - she’s perhaps best known as the witch who turns the sailors into pigs, and yet who ultimately invites Odysseus to be her lover and to abide with her, along with his men, for a year. Like its predecessor, Miller’s new book, “Circe,” illuminates known stories from a new perspective. In this newspaper, Daniel Mendelsohn described the book as having “the head of a young adult novel, the body of the ‘Iliad’ and the hindquarters of Barbara Cartland” - ironically a fitting contemporary monster for the task of bringing the “Iliad” to a new readership. Her fresh and contemporary understanding of this ancient story from the “Iliad” thrilled many and unnerved others. In that novel, Miller took on the story of Achilles from the perspective of Patroclus, his intimate and, in Miller’s version, his lover. More recently, Madeline Miller, a classicist and teacher, published “The Song of Achilles”: Widely acclaimed and translated, it received the Orange Prize for fiction in 2012. Mary Renault stands as the 20th-century exemplar of the fully imagined retelling, most famously with “The King Must Die,” in which she granted Theseus his voice and conjured for readers the minute and vivid details of his upbringing and heroic deeds. In all versions, the concision and openness of the accounts were essential: Somehow authoritative rather than vague, they allowed an exhilarating freedom of imagination.Īs familiar as those from the Bible, these stories saturate our literary history, in renditions and translations, allusions and transformations. ![]() I recall with intense pleasure my discovery in childhood of the Greek myths and Homer’s “Iliad,” in various editions, from an early acquaintance with d’Aulaire’s to Roger Lancelyn Green’s versions and, at the French school I attended for several years, a collection memorably entitled “Mythes et Légendes du Monde Grecque et Barbare.” Homer proper came later, in high school, affording both similar and distinct pleasures.
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