In October 2023, I was honoured to give a public lecture at the Erasmus Darwin House in Litchfield. They have a series of Lunar Lectures, in which academics give talks under the full moon, and I was very excited to be invited to do one. I proceeded to a talk to mostly septuagenarians (and my mum) about toxic masculinity in Greek myth retellings. Although it was a little embarrassing at times, it went surprisingly well, and we even went into a QAnon and Incel segue in the Q&A, which married up my research interests in very interesting ways. My research lately has been focused on modern day masculinity, with a particular focus on the manosphere and online toxic masculinity. It was really interesting to tie that together with my ongoing love for the Classics and adaptations thereof.
I thought I would share a pared down version here, but it quickly became overlong and annoying, more like an essay than a blog post. So I'm going to split it into the different mythic men that I talked about in the lecture. This first instalment was on Atlas and Heracles, the protagonists of Jeanette Winterson's novella for the Canongate Myth Series, Weight (2005).
This time, we're going to be diving into the Trojan War and everyone's favourite angry boy, Achilles. Achilles is at the forefront of Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, but they contend with his legend in quite distinct ways
I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed revisiting it!
'Ancient Myths, Modern Masculinities: Toxic Masculinity in Greek Myth Retellings'
In this paper, I ask what the specific value might be of analysing mythic men with reference to modern theories of masculinity. If the role of myth in antiquity was to narrate and etiologically explain the social and natural order, adapting myth re-appropriates these ancient myths to shed light on contemporary society.
So, adaptations of ancient men can comment on contemporary masculinities.
Online, Alt-Right, white nationalist, men's rights groups (known as The Red Pill) use classical mythology, philosophy, imagery, and iconography to promote their vitriolic agendas. Donna Zuckerberg researches the weaponisation of the literature and history of ancient Greece and Rome by the men of the Red Pill, to promote white supremacist and patriarchal ideologies in her text Not All Dead White Men (Zuckerberg 2019: 5). She looks at how men on these Reddit pages use, for example, Ovid’s Ars Amatoria and the myth of Phaedra and Hippolytus to reinforce rape culture (Ibid., 5). For her, this trend cannot be ignored because it has the potential to reshape how ancient Greece and Rome are perceived in the modern world, and because they lend historical weight and legitimacy to discriminatory world views.
But, what we are seeing in contemporary literary retellings of Greek myth are versions of the heroes that engage with modern concerns about masculinity, such as homosocial bonds, hegemonic masculinity, and toxic masculinity.
‘Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,’
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| c.300BC pottery painting, Phthia |
In The Song of Achilles, Miller chooses to present an Achilles that is not defined by his rage, the rage that opens the Iliad: ‘Rage—Goddess, sing the rage of Peleus’ son Achilles,’ (Homer, trans. Fagles: 1:1).
Miller’s Achilles is not portrayed as stereotypically masculine, which is particularly striking when he poses as a woman in Deidameia’s entourage:
He was holding the earrings up to his ears now, turning them this way and that, pursing his lips, playing at girlishness
(Miller 2011: 152)
Achilles ‘playing at girlishness’ is an act of gender performativity, in that he is, in Judith Butler’s terms, staging femininity. For Butler there are no intrinsic traits of masculinity or femininity, but by performing the socially accepted traits of the gender binary, people reinforce ‘the illusion that there is an inner gender core’ (Salih & Butler 2004: 254).
Achilles – an archetype of mythic masculinity, enduring throughout the centuries as an ideal warrior – wearing a dress and performing womanhood reveals the performativity of gender itself.
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| Discovery of Achilles, Poussin (1656) - Achilles is on the right, dressed as a woman drawing a sword; Odysseus and Diomedes on the left |
As classicist Caroline Alexander writes in The War That Killed Achilles – a text that studies what the Iliad can tell us about attitudes to war throughout the centuries – ‘when one of the “girls”, ignoring the other finery, grasps [the armaments], they know they have found their man. The fact that Achilles was not immediately recognizable as a young man is intended to be a tribute to his striking beauty’ (Alexander 2009: 94). Alexander also notes that Achilles’ Olympian foil can tell us much about his character:
The traits that define Apollo - bringer and averter of destruction, healing powers, aloofness and withdrawal, youthful beauty, skill in the lyre – have a striking counterpart in the Iliad: these are the traits that also define Achilles, the most beautiful hero at Troy, whose wrath has wrought plaguelike destruction, who was taught healing arts by Chiron, and who is discovered by the Embassy in his tent [playing the lyre]
(172)
To the Ancient Greeks, beauty to the point of femininity and hypermasculine wrath were not mutually exclusive, but rather qualities that combine to accentuate one another in gods and godlike heroes.
In choosing to accentuate Achilles’ beauty and overwrite his wrath, it is clear that the purpose of Miller’s adaptation is to preserve Achilles’ heroism and make it palatable to a modern audience that would not valorise rape and violence.
Conversely, Achilles in Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls is dethroned from his heroic legend.
The opening lines of the novel make it abundantly clear that this narrative is not going to preserve Achilles’ song:
Great Achilles. Brilliant Achilles, shining Achilles, godlike Achilles … how the epitaphs pile up. We never called him any of those things; we called him “the Butcher”
(Barker 2018: 3)
In stripping him of his epithets, and unerringly emphasising his brutality, the narrator conveys that the purpose of the novel is antithetical to any sympathetic portrayal of Achilles.
Briseis, the protagonist of Barker’s novel, is ‘his reward for killing sixty men in one day,’ (7), which is a very blunt way to communicate Achilles’ martial brutality. Equally, the line ‘He fucked as quickly as he killed’ (28) provides an unflinching portrayal of his sexual violence – the blunt, direct, and matter of fact language delivered in short clauses serve to dethrone Achilles from his heroic status.
Barker does not overwrite Achilles’ Apollonian beauty in her quest to scrutinize and delegitimize Achilles’ claim to heroism: her Achilles is depicted as ‘probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent,’ (56).
His beauty remains inextricable from his characterisation, as it was for Homer and Miller, but it does not indicate any sort of morality or godliness in his character. While he is ‘probably’ the most beautiful, his brutality is ‘certain’.
This depiction of sexual violence is not limited to Achilles; indeed, it is portrayed as a systemic problem throughout the Greek army. After the murdering and ‘the looting stopped – there was nothing left to take – and the drinking began in earnest. […] / And then they turned their attention to us’ (16).
The list form shows the progression of the army’s actions, from raiding, to murdering, to looting, to drinking, to then ‘turn[ing] their attention’ to the women with the intention of raping and enslaving them.
The apparent naturalness of their actions speaks to endemic rape culture ‘in which rape and sexual assault are common [...] a culture in which dominant social norms belittle, dismiss, joke about or even seem to condone rape and sexual assault’ and in which ‘victims are silenced and blamed, the crime is normalized and perpetrators are completely ignored’ (Bates 2018: 56; 61).
This culture is strongly echoed in Barker’s novel, most notably in the way in which it works to silence victims, and the title of The Silence of the Girls refers specifically to this systemic silencing of female victims.
In addition, sexual assault is normalised and condoned, as demonstrated both in the previous example and when Briseis reports seeing ‘a woman raped repeatedly by a gang of men who were sharing a wine jug, passing it good-naturedly from hand to hand while waiting their turn’ (16). Here, gang-raping women is as normal as sharing a drink, and the soldiers’ cheerful, patient demeanours clearly indicates that the behaviour is condoned.
Barker’s anachronistic use of rugby chants draws a direct line between the brutal, explicit rape culture in the ancient and mythical army and contemporary culture, where in the U.K., for instance, over 85,000 women are raped and 400,000 sexually assaulted every year (Bates 2018: 56).
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| The Anger of Achilles, David (1819) Achilles, Clytemnestra, Iphigenia, Agamemnon (L-R) |
Barker’s novel exemplifies one approach to dealing with mythic masculinities, which is to highlight how such age-old violence is still present in mainstream culture, perpetuated in acts as seemingly harmless as rugby chanting.
As much as there is a continuum between normalised rape culture and sexual violence, so too is there a continuum between these ancient myths and enduring essentialised assumptions regarding male power and female subjugation.
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