Myth makeover

  Among my most treasured books as a child was a volume of Greek myths. [...] It infiltrated my childhood imagination – it was one of the things that set me on the path to studying classics, and becoming a writer. The stories were strange and wild, full of powerful witches, unpredictable gods and sword-wielding slayers. They were also extreme: about families who turn murderously on each other; impossible tasks set by cruel kings; love that goes wrong; wars and journeys and terrible loss. There was magic, there was shapeshifting, there were monsters, there were descents to the land of the dead. Humans and immortals inhabited the same world, which was sometimes perilous, sometimes exciting. The stories were obviously fantastical.
  All the same, brothers really do war with each other. People tell the truth bur aren't believed. Wars destroy the innocent. Lovers are parted. [...] Floods and fire tear lives apart. [...] Greek myths remain true for us because they excavate the very extremes of human experience: sudden, inexplicable catastrophe; radical reversals of fortune; seemingly arbitrary events that transform lives. They deal, in short, in the hard basic facts of the human condition. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, myths were everywhere. [...]
  Some of the flattening-down of the strangeness and violence of the characters of classical literature has doubtless been an understandable consequence of retelling the tales with children in mind. But the Greek myths shouldn't be thought of as children's stories – or just as children's stories. In some ways, they are the most grownup stories I know. In recent years there has been a blossoming of novels – among them Par Barker's The Silence of the Girls, Natalie Haynes's A Thousand Ships and Madeline Miller's Circe – that have placed female mythological characters at the centre of stories to which they have often been regarded as peripheral. [...] Once activated by a fresh imagination, the stories burst into fresh life.