A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - G Is For Glaucus And Robert Graves

  Glaucus is the name of a number of characters in Greek mythology. One was the father of Bellerophon, the guy who rode Pegasus(see my earlier post). Not a nice man. He wanted his mares to be spirited enough to win races, so he didn’t let them breed and offended the goddess Aphrodite, who complained to Zeus that he fed them on human flesh. Anyway, she took them at night to drink from a well sacred to herself and fed them a herb, hippomanes, which sounds to me like something meaning “drives horses crazy”. The next time he harnessed them up, they attacked and ate him. That was the end of Glaucus, except he is supposed to have hung around as a ghost at the Isthmian Games, scaring the horses of competitors. Robert Graves thinks this might be about the sacred king being killed by women in horse masks at the end of his reign, which makes me think that real life was just as bad as what happened in the myths, only no actual gods involved. If he was indeed guilty of encouraging his horses to eat human meat, then his end was karma, though knowing Greek gods, Aphrodite was more interested in the no-sex rule than flesh eating. After all, she had to feed the horses drugs to drive them crazy, right?

Another Glaucus was a son of Minos and Pasiphae. The poor little boy was wandering around in the Labyrinth and was found drowned in a huge jar of honey, after a competition connected with an oracle said the man who did the best  simile for a colour changing calf would find him. A man called Polyeidus won the prize - it was like a ripening mulberry, he said - but found the prize was having to find the child, then not being let out till he figured a way to bring him back to life. This being Greek mythology, he did, when he watched a snake bring its mate back to life with a certain herb.

Young Glaucus was then taught divination, reluctantly, by Polyeidus, who took it back when he left Crete by telling the boy to spit in his mouth. Oh, well.

Glaucus And Scylla. Public Domain

There was also a Glaucus who was a sea god. He didn’t start off as one, though he may have been a demi god, a son of Poseidon. In any case, he was mortal, and is said to have noticed a certain herb or grass that brought a fish back to life. He had some and jumped off the cliff into the sea, now immortal. He lived underwater off the coast of Delos, and was known both for his oracular skills - apparently he taught Apollo himself - and for his enthusiasm for sex.

He turns up in Madeleine Miller’s Circe, as a perfectly nice young fisherman, her boyfriend for whom she organises immortality. He turns out to be thoroughly obnoxious as an immortal and when he starts dating the nymph Scylla behind her back, Circe turns her into a man-eating monster. 

Now for one G I’ve mentioned a number of times, Robert Graves. Graves was a poet and historical novelist, among other things. He wrote I, Claudius and Claudius the God, which were adapted for a brilliant TV series with Derek Jacobi in the lead role, and John Hurt as Caligula. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it. I have it on DVD, but some streaming platform must have it. It was inspired by Suetonius’s The Twelve Caesars. We owe our image of the early emperors from Augustus onwards to Suetonius - and Graves. 

He wrote a novel, Homer’s Daughter, which told the story of the Odyssey from the viewpoint of Princess Nausicaa, the Phaeacian girl whose family entertained Odysseus and helped him get home. Graves believed that the Odyssey was written by a woman because it has so much feminine detail. On the other hand, it also has Telemachus talking to his mother in a manner that should have earned him a spanking if he had been younger. Very patriarchal! 

Graves was also a classicist and folklorist, who wrote The Greek Myths, a classic and maybe definitive collection, with lots of footnotes and commentaries, plenty of stuff about the Triple Goddess and the sacred king. It certainly got me into the myths, and I was in primary school at the time. My sister borrowed it four times from the library before I finished it. I still treasure my own copy. He also wrote The White Goddess, which was about a lot of stuff he used in The Greek Myths, but mostly Celtic rather than Greek. He was inspired by Frazer’s folklore classic The Golden Bough. (I have the Frazer in ebook). 

I’ll give you a link to his Wikipedia bio, because it lists all his work, including his poetry collections.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Graves

By the way, he makes an appearance in an episode of Young Indiana Jones! It’s set during World War I when Graves was fighting in France. 

Tomorrow, come back for H Is For Helen Of Troy and  Heracles.

See you then! 

F Is For Fantasy Fiction Based on Greek Myth

 Here are some books(and one film) with Greek mythology themes and a bit of fantasy! 

Rick Riordan - Percy Jackson series.

I’ve only read a couple of these books, but they are fun and they get kids interested in Greek mythology. The hero is a son of Poseidon in the modern US. He meets and has adventures with other teenage demigods. The books were hard to keep on my library shelves. There is a film based on the first book, Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief. The author has written a Percy Jackson guide to the myths, so quite educational!

Circe by Madeleine Miller. Mentioned already here, plus reviewed a while back. The heroine is Circe, best known for turning men into animals, and the story is seen from her viewpoint.

The King Must Die and its sequel, The Bull From The Sea by Mary  Renault 

Absolute classics! 

Not quite fantasy, apart from the fact that Theseus, the hero, can tell when an earthquake is coming, a family trait. The first novel is the story of Theseus from childhood to his return from Crete, the sequel covers the rest of his life. The teenagers sent to Crete are all small and light, including Theseus, and are not sent to be eaten, but to train as bull dancers. The bull headed man is just a heraldic device. Minotaur is the title of the heir to the throne, like the Prince of Wales. Mind you, he’s not a nice man! 

Henry  Treece and Ken Catran. 

Henry Treece wrote a lot of children’s and YA historical novels, including  some on Greek mythology themes. I have read Oedipus, which has interpreted the myth very interestingly. It does have a flavour of Mary Renault. I have also read and enjoyed Jason, which is available on Apple Books. 

Kiwi author Ken Catran wrote Voyage With Jason, in which the voyage of the Argo is seen from the viewpoint of the ship’s cabin boy! 

Not fantasy, but the film, O, Brother, Where Art Thou, is inspired by the Odyssey. A trio of convicts escape from a chain gang in the American South during the 1930s. The main character, Ulysses, wants to get back to talk his wife, Penelope, out of marrying someone else. Along the way, they have adventures involving Sirens(women singing as they wash clothes by the river and seducing our heroes), Lotus Eaters(a group of religious folk going to the river for baptism), the Cyclops(an insane one-eyed Bible salesman) all happening among bluegrass music and folk songs. A wonderful film! 

Till We Have Faces by C.S Lewis. The story of  Cupid and Psyche, the Beauty And The Beast story told in the Roman novel The Golden Ass, as seen through the eyes of one of her sisters. I can’t tell you more without spoilers. I managed to find this in ebook, though the print book is probably well out of print. It’s not as well known as the Narnia books, but well worth a read. 

The Dancer From Atlantis by Poul Anderson. A time travel novel in which our hero and a few other people from different historical periods are swept into the time of Theseus and bull dancers. In this story, tributes are taken to Crete, not to be eaten or even necessarily as bull dancers, but to learn to live like Cretans, so that by the time they go home, they have become allies to the Cretan court. Theseus is the villain.  Oh, and it includes the Thera explosion, with the suggestion that Thera is the inspiration for Atlantis.

Wendy Orr trilogy 

 

Three children’s novels by Canadian/Aussie author Wendy Orr(watch out for my review of the final one, coming soon). They are not exactly connected with the myths, but they are set in the same era and there is one throwaway line about Troy in the third book. The first one, Dragonfly Song, has a fair bit of fantasy in it and features a young girl with elective mutism who goes to Crete as a tribute, to train as a bull dancer.

 The second, Swallow’s Dance, is about a girl, Leira, who escapes from the Thera explosion with her family, after her father has a scary dream. 

I’m just finishing the third,  Cuckoo’s Flight, about Leira’s granddaughter, whose father is a Trojan refugee. More about that when my review goes up. A wonderful trilogy! The first two have won awards, so I’m not the only one who thinks so.

 The Hunger Games has a theme connected to Greek myth. In the story of Theseus, the tributes are sent to Crete as a punishment for the death of a son of Minos. In The Hunger Games the tributes are sent to the Capitol as a punishment for a rebellion that happened a long time ago, which makes it clear to the Districts just who is in charge and what could still happen if they try it again. Plus Katniss offers herself as a tribute, like Theseus, and overthrows the oppressive regime. 

Anything else you can think of? 

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - E Is For Electra

 Here is one of the darker Greek myths, with murder and vengeance a-plenty. Now I think of it, there is murder and vengeance in quite a lot of the myths, but this is nasty! 

Electra is the daughter of King Agamemnon, leader of the Greek troops in the Trojan War, and his Queen, Clytemnestra, sister of Helen of Troy. She is one of three children born to the couple. One of them, Iphigenia, was sacrificed to get the winds going for the expedition. The only son was Orestes. 

I won’t go too far into the background story, which is really too sad, though, like many other myths, it’s the subject of Greek tragedies. 

Agamemnon and his family were not happy or loving, and no wonder. Agamemnon was not Clytemnestra’s first husband. He had killed her first husband, along with her baby. And then, as if that was not bad enough, he sent her a letter from where the troops were waiting for a favourable wind to get them to Troy, saying, “Good news, young Achilles wants to marry our Iphigenia, send her immediately!” 

Instead, the girl found herself being hauled up to the altar of Artemis, who was angry because Agamemnon had killed one of her deer, and murdered to get that wind going. 

As you can imagine, Clytemnestra was not happy. She started plotting with her lover, one Aegisthus, who was also not pleased with Agamemnon’s family, the Atreus clan. Atreus, father of Agamemnon, had killed off Aegisthus’s siblings and done a bit of cooking... Really, not a nice man, but neither was Aegisthus. 

When Agamemnon returned from the war, these two lovers killed him and took over the throne of Mycenae.

That left Electra and her brother Orestes to avenge their Dad, which they did, with Orestes killing Aesgisthus and Clytemnestra, with his sister’s enthusiastic encouragement. 

In those days, vengeance was generally okay and fair enough, as long as you understood the vendetta started would just keep going, but you did not, repeat, not, kill your mother under any circumstances! If you did, you were likely to be chased by these three scary snake-haired women called the Erinyes, or Furies(Roman version) though you had to refer to them as the Kindly Ones. So, although Electra had been involved, it was only Orestes who suffered from their punishment, going mad. Don’t you love this painting? There is the murdered Clytemnestra, knife through her, with the three goddesses of vengeance yelling something like, “Look what you’ve done, you little sh-t!”

Orestes and the Furies - Public Domain

Eventually, there is a trial by the gods of Olympus, and Orestes is pardoned. 

I recommend a novel by Kerry Greenwood, Electra, part of the Delphic Women trilogy. In this version, Electra’s hatred for her mother and Aegisthus is explained by his having raped her, and her mother doing nothing about it. Orestes is, in fact, her child, not her brother. She is helped to escape by Trojan Princess Cassandra who, in this novel, didn’t get killed by Clytemnestra. It’s a lovely book, available with the other two novels in the trilogy, Medea and Cassandra, on the Clan Destine Press web site. Here is the link.

https://www.clandestinepress.net/products/electra

It’s available much cheaper in ebook on the Apple Books site. If you want it in Kindle you may be out of luck, but buy it in print if you can. 

You can probably read it without having read either of the other two books, but they, too, are worth a read.

Tomorrow - Fantasy and Greek Myths!

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021: D Is For Daedalus

 The heroes of Greek myth are generally royalty of one kind or another. Daedalus was a member of the Athenian royal family. He was a genius craftsman, and nice to know that in those days members of a royal family were allowed to practise a trade. 

He was not a nice man; it was killing his young nephew Talos that got him into trouble and sent him fleeing fromAthens. Talos, Daedalus’s apprentice, apparently invented the saw. This made Daedalus jealous, so he pushed him off the Acropolis. You can find this story, by the way, dramatised in the Greek Myths section of Jim Henson’s series The Storyteller, told by Michael Gambon. It also tells the story we know best, that of Icarus. I’ve found it on Amazon Prime, if you’re interested.

But Daedalus was a genius. When he fled Athens, he ended up for some time living at the court of Minos of Crete, where he was made welcome for his skills. He must have been there for a while, because that’s where his beloved son Icarus was born. He also had time to design the Labyrinth, where the Minotaur was imprisoned and girls and boys sent to be eaten. (Well, that’s the myth, anyway. In Mary Renault’s novel The King Must Die, the Labyrinth was the name of the palace complex)

Another commission he had, which got him into huge trouble, was from the Queen, Pasiphae, sister of Circe. Greek myths have a lot of dirty stories, not surprising in a religion that had such randy gods. There was a white bull from the sea, sent by sea god Poseidon to Minos, when he promised to sacrifice it. It was such a very pretty bull, though, that Minos kept it. 

Goodness knows why Poseidon supplied his own sacrifice, but a promise was a promise and Poseidon got his revenge by making Pasiphae develop a crazy passion for the bull and... well, she was a goddess, after all, but even a goddess might find it a bit hard to do bestiality with a bull without help. 

That’s where Daedalus came in. He built her a wooden cow that let her climb in and receive the attentions of the bull from the sea. By the time Minos found out that she had almost literally crowned him with horns, the baby was born, a boy with a bull’s head. 

Personally I can’t see any logic in feeding a semi-bull meat, as cattle are herbivores, right? But there are man-eating horses in other myths, so what the heck. 

Daedalus was again in trouble. Being a genius craftsman, he prepared for his escape with his son. This is the best- known story,of course, but I’ll tell it anyway. 

Daedalus built feathered wings for both of them, with the feathers stuck to wax. He warned the boy to follow him and not fly too high, but boys will be boys and like a teenager doing wheelies he just had to fly high, so the sun melted the wax and down he came, drowning. 

Daedalus had several more adventures, even ending up using some of his gadgets to kill Minos, who had followed him. He sort of had a happy ending, settling in Sardinia.

I’m including here a painting by Pieter Brueghel the Elder, because I love this one. Notice the 16th century landscape and ships at sea, with everybody just getting on with their everyday work while, in the bottom right hand side of the painting, Icarus’s legs are sticking out of the water as he drowns.

Brueghel Landscape With The Fall Of Icarus, public domain 

Here is a link to Auden’s poem, Musee Des Beaux Arts,  partly inspired by this painting.

http://english.emory.edu/classes/paintings&poems/auden.html

Comment Additional

Drat! It won't let me switch on Captcha, so for now I'll see how I go with the spam. Two days to see how much spam I get, then back to normal if it's too much.

On Comments For This Month

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you'll know that I accept comments from people with Google accounts, no anonymous comments. Last year I changed briefly to "anyone can comment", only to find myself overwhelmed with spam.I do still get some soam, but very littlecand I deal with it in my "owner spproval" box. However, someone whose blog I visited said they couldn't comment, so... I'm going to try an experiment. I'll change my setting to "anyone" but also switch on the CAPTCHA thing. if that still gets me spam, I'll go back to normal.

A To Z Blogging Challenge: C Is For Circe!

 

John William Waterhouse. Public Domain

The goddess Circe, daughter of Helios the sun god and an ocean nymph, appears in a lot of poems, including Ovid’s Metamorphoses,  the Aeneid and the Argonautica, some ancient Greek plays and at least one novel, by Madeleine Miller, which I read and reviewed here.  https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2018/05/just-finished-reading-circe-by.html  She is the sister of Pasiphae, mother of the Minotaur, and Aeetes, king of Colchis and father of Medea, who turned up on Circe’s island Aeaea, on her way back to Greece with her lover Jason.

She is best known, though, for her appearance in the Odyssey. Her home Aeaea is full of wild beasts, wolves and lions, who, as Odysseus and his crew discover, are transformed sailors who had visited the island and made the mistake of accepting Circe’s hospitality. (In the Miller novel, it’s punishment for a group of sailors who had raped her.)

Odysseus, on his way back from Troy, stops by the island and allows some of his men shore leave. Led by the ship’s first mate, Eurylochus, they explore and find themselves being greeted by a beautiful woman, Circe, who is singing at her loom. She offers them dinner, which is drugged. Eurylochus is suspicious and stays outside the house, where he sees Circe turn his shipmates into pigs and hurries back to warn Odysseus. Luckily, Odysseus has some help from a few gods, including Hermes, the trickster god, who gives him a magical herb called moly, which will keep him safe from transformation. 

I’m sure quite a lot of women will feel that it wouldn’t have been too far a stretch between the sailors and pigdom, especially when you consider their behaviour in the rest of the Odyssey. Still, they are Odysseus’s lads and he isn’t going to abandon them. 

So, he marches up to the house, accepts the offer of dinner and, much to Circe’s dismay, isn’t affected by her magic, due to the moly. He threatens her, then sleeps with her on her promise not to harm him and to turn back all those enchanted sailors, including his men.

Odysseus stays with her for a while, long enough to father three sons, including the one who will eventually kill him. At this point, Circe gives him information and advice so he can get home safely. One of the places he must go is past Scylla’s rock, where six of his men are seized and eaten. The irony is that the monster Scylla is there in the first place because Circe turned her into one, over a man, for goodness’ sake! 

Circe eventually marries Odysseus’s son Telemachus, after Odysseus’s death. I suppose we could say she more or less lives happily ever after, which is more than can be said for Odysseus, or, for that matter, his men, who are all dead by the time he gets home to his Penelope. 

Stick around for my next post, on Monday, which is D is for Daedalus!  

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021 - B Is For Bellerophon!

 This is the story of a man, a monster and a winged horse. 

Public domain

Bellerophon was a grandson of Sisyphus, the crafty character who so annoyed the gods that he ended up rolling a stone up a hill in the underworld, only to have it roll back eternally.

 Bellerophon started his adventures by killing two people, including his own brother. In the Greek myths, this doesn’t always lead to punishment and doesn’t always make you a villain. He ran away and took refuge with a King called Proetus, whose wife Anteia fancied him and, when he said no, did a Potiphar’s wife and accused him of rape to her husband. Proetus didn’t want to kill a guest, but did want to get rid of him, so sent him to his father in law, King Iobates, with a sealed note asking him to kill the bearer for what he had done. 

But the guest thing was strong in that part of the world. You just didn’t kill your guest. Iobates figured a fight with a monster would do the trick, so asked him nicely if he’d very much mind killing the Chimaera, a fire breathing female monster who was part lion, part goat and part snake. Robert Graves thinks she was a symbol of the seasons, though frankly, if a fire breathing monster was heading my way, I wouldn’t stop to worry about whether she was a symbol. 

Public domain 

Neither did Bellerophon. But he wasn’t stupid. He got himself something to help. The goddess Athena gave him a golden bridle, which he used to catch the winged horse Pegasus. You may have seen Pegasus in Clash Of The Titans, only in that film he was ridden by Perseus on his quest to kill the Gorgon Medusa. Pegasus doesn’t belong to that story, except that he sprang from Medusa’s blood, but when you have Ray Harryhausen doing special effects, you don’t worry too much. 

Bellerophon rode his winged steed and killed the Chimaera with a spear that had lead on the end, which melted in her own fire and ran down her throat. 

As Bellerophon came back alive from that quest, Iobates came up with some more little jobs for him. He survived the lot.

Finally, Iobates became curious and asked Bellerophon for his side of the Anteia story, apologised and gave him his other daughter in marriage. 

Because this is Greek myth, not a fairy tale, it didn’t end up happily ever after. Bellerophon got cocky enough to ride Pegasus to Olympus. Zeus sent a gadfly to sting Pegasus, who reared and flung off his rider. Bellerophon survived, but was injured and blinded and ended up wandering the earth alone and miserable. As for Pegasus, he ended up as Zeus’s pack horse to carry his thunderbolts.

You can decide if that was an honour or not. 

Tomorrow I will be telling you about the goddess Circe and putting in links to some connected fiction.

A To Z Blogging Challenge 2021: A Is For Apple(Golden Variety)

                                       

Hesperides, Burne-Jones.Public Domain

Golden apples appear in Greek myths more than once. Robert Graves had a theory about them being the sacred king’s passport to paradise. Whatever. Let’s just think of the stories. Here are three. 

The golden apples of the Hesperides were on a tree belonging to the goddess Hera. The Hesperides were the daughters of the Titan Atlas, who were set to guard the tree, but the girls couldn’t resist scrumping apples, so the job was given to a dragon called Ladon instead. Unfortunately for Ladon, he was shot by Heracles in the course of his Eleventh Labour. 

Not that Heracles actually picked the apples himself. According to the story, which I remember first hearing from a teacher in primary school(I think it was Mr Kaufman, who also introduced us to the Peanuts cartoons), Heracles had no idea where to find the orchard, so, being a hero, instead of asking directions, he grabbed Nereus, one of those sea gods who tend to change shape when you catch them, and asked him the way. Nereus told him, and also advised him to get Atlas to fetch the apples for him. 

Atlas, who was holding up the world by then, agreed if Heracles held up the world while he went to fetch the apples. Heracles shot the dragon and took the load. At this point, instead of running off, Atlas got the apples and returned, but wasn’t keen to take back his load. 

“Okay,” said Heracles, “but could you just hold it for a minute while I put something on my head to make it more comfortable?” 

Poor, dumb Atlas obliged, and you can guess what happened next. Heracles had to hand the apples to Eurystheus, the king who was setting the tasks. And after all that, the apples were handed back. The point was just to do it! 

The next golden apple story has a girl called Atalanta in it. Atalanta was a tough warrior gal and a speedy runner. When her father told her she had to get married, she said she would only marry the man who could outrun her in a foot race. Anyone who lost would be killed. A young man called Melanion decided to have a go. The goddess Aphrodite gave him three golden apples(were they from the orchard of the Hesperides, I wonder?) and told him to roll them ahead of Atalanta during the race. They did the trick beautifully as she was distracted by stopping to pick them up, a bit like the tortoise and the hare, and lost the race. She had to marry him then, but eventually ran off with a guy called Meleager, whom she had met during the Calydonian boar hunt. Oh, well. 

My favourite is the story of the golden apple that sort of started the Trojan War. You think the fairy in Sleeping Beauty was offended by not being invited to a party? Try Eris, goddess of discord, who was not invited to the wedding of Peleus and Thetis(parents of Achilles). She actually started a whole war over it! 

Using a golden apple. 

Throwing down the apple, labelled “For the fairest” between three goddesses, Hera, Aphrodite and Athene, she flew off cackling. Maybe there were evening classes in psychology on Olympus? Anyway, the three of them fought over it and went off to get a ruling from Paris, the Trojan prince currently working as a humble herdsman. Aphrodite bribed him with a promise to give him the beautiful Helen, even though she was married. So was he, for that matter, but what the heck. He awarded her the apple. Frankly, I wouldn’t have wanted to be Paris, with three goddesses glaring at me, one of them the Queen of the gods. 

There is a lot of Trojan War fiction, some of which I will mention later in this series of posts, but I’ll give a plug here to a short story I wrote for an anthology, Light Touch Paper, Stand Clear, published by Peggy Bright Press. In my story, “Five Ways To Start A War”,  Paris awards the apple to Aphrodite less because of the bribe and more because of what she could do to his favourite bodily organ if she is annoyed...  If you’re curious, the anthology is still available from the publisher or Amazon.

Come back tomorrow for the tale of Bellerophon and the Chimera! 

Intro to A To Z 2021: The Greek Myths

 

Just a brief intro to my planned month of posts on Greek myths. I knew that X wouldn’t be a problem this time, but there were other letters that were, eg F and W, so I have found other ways to use them. 

For the same reason, I’m spelling names for convenience, eg K instead of C, but only when convenient to me. Ignore - the characters are the same people. 

Where I think it’s interesting I’ve included mentions of fiction about various characters and stories based on Greek myths. I’ll include links to where you can buy them.

There are so very many interesting stories, so sometimes I’ll write about more than one character per letter, but even so, I’ll miss some. Feel free to tell me your favourites I have skipped in the comments. 

I highly recommend Robert Graves’ book The Greek Myths, which is still easily available, in ebook and print. It certainly got me interested, when I was a child(I suspect he would have been embarrassed to learn that a little girl was reading his book!). You may or may not agree with all those footnotes about Sacred Kings and Triple Goddesses, but he was thorough and he gave all the variants he knew of each myth.

See you on April 1!

Some Moses Fiction For Passover!

 With Passover just around the corner, I thought it might be time to talk about some Moses-themed fiction. I’ve read a few over the years, beginning with a novel by Howard Fast. When I read it in my teens, it was called Moses, Prince Of Egypt. You can still buy it in ebook, with a different title and an introduction by the author, written in 1999.

The original title suits the book, really, because it began when he was a ten year old prince in the court of Ramses II and ended with him walking into the desert accompanied by his faithful servant Nun, future father of the tribal leader Joshua. He did intend to do it as a trilogy, but it didn’t happen. He did, many years later, write a novella set on the last night of Moses’ life, but seen from the viewpoint of the new leader Joshua. I have that story in a Howard Fast Reader, which contains a couple of his novels and quite a few short stories.

It was an intriguing tale, which suggested a plan to bring back the worship of Aten, which had gone with the death of the monotheist Pharaoh, Akhenaten. It is, of course, a deep secret, because anyone caught at it would be in big trouble. The name Moses actually means “a child is given” and usually a god’s name is added, eg , Thut-Mose, meaning “Thoth gave a child”. The hero of this novel is called “Moses of the half name” by people who don’t like him, but his royal mother deliberately left off the god-name in hopes of one day calling him Aten-Moses. Of course, that never happens. Young Moses has adventures and sees people he loves die before he finally has to leave Egypt. It is one of my favourites on this theme, perhaps my very favourite. Like Fast’s other novels it’s very character-driven; for me, no matter how good a story, it doesn’t work if you don’t care about the characters.

A novella-length Moses story by Thomas Mann appears in a themed anthology called The Ten Commandments, but the theme isn’t about Moses, it’s about how the Nazis broke every one of the Commandments. Mann’s is the only one of the ten stories that references the original. I have to say, if you can get a copy of this book, probably on ABEBooks, the rest of the stories are well worth a read. 

Like Joseph And His Brothers, Thomas Mann’s thick-as-brick rendering of a very short story from the Bible, his Moses novella is fun. What? Moses funny? Oh, yes. Mann manages it. Like Howard Fast, he writes a character-driven tale, and you really feel for this young man! 

Mann’s Moses is actually the child of Pharaoh’s daughter, conceived one afternoon when she spots a rather nice-looking Hebrew slave working in the garden. The poor man is killed soon afterwards, though not on her orders. When the baby is born, his mother pretends to find him in the bulrushes. 

He is brought up with the family of his nurse, to whom he returns when school is getting a bit much of a hassle for him. His foster siblings are, of course, Aaron and Miriam.

When he does turn up with Aaron at Pharaoh’s court, the king has trouble keeping a straight face, especially when Aaron does the rod-into-snake trick(a very old magic trick involving holding a snake so it gets stiff). Pharaoh doesn’t kill Moses because he recognises his grandson and knows his daughter will make a fuss if he does.

The most recent book I’ve read on this theme is Judith Tarr’s Pillar Of Fire, which I have reviewed here. https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2020/07/on-unearthing-another-treasure-pillar.html It’s not a new book, and I had a copy in hardcover, bought years ago at a shop long since closed, but you can still get it, at least in ebook; for the details, follow the link. Judith Tarr has read Freud’s Moses And Monotheism and in her novel Akhenaten is Moses! He is a lousy king, but a true prophet of his god, so when it’s becoming clear that he is going to end up killed, he is persuaded to fake his death and is smuggled out into the desert by some Hebrew relatives(long story, you need to read it). He is a lot happier outside of Egypt and respected by his new tribe as a prophet. He also becomes sane. The story is seen from the viewpoint of Nofret, a Hittite slave who has been serving Akhenaten’s daughter Ankhesenpaaten. 

There are quite a few films or miniseries. There is the Charlton Heston version, which is famous for the parting of the Red Sea sequence. I probably shouldn’t call it silly, even if it is, but it has an impressive cast, amazing costumes(more Hollywood than ancient Egypt), music by Elmer Bernstein. 

The Prince Of Egypt is an animation voiced by some big names, including Val Kilmer as Moses and Patrick Stewart as Seti I, who in this version is the king who ordered the deaths of the male babies. It’s also a musical... I did read somewhere that we narrowly escaped this being a Moses film with a singing camel! The animation is terrific, though, and you have almost certainly heard of everyone in the cast. Here is the Wikipedia entry. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prince_of_Egypt  It ends with the parting of the Red Sea, with Moses being sad to have to say farewell to his foster brother Ramses, stuck in the other side.

A TV miniseries, Moses The     Lawgiver, is now up on YouTube, here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=hGwZVocmr98 The lead is played by Burt Lancaster, the younger Moses by his son, who has very similar mannerisms to his father. Most of the extras are Israelis, and it’s interesting to hear Hebrew being spoken in the background in the Israelite camp. Some of those with speaking roles are dubbed with British accents(I’ve seen at least one of them in another film with a very strong Hebrew accent). The music is by the wonderful Ennio Morricone, whom you probably know best for composing music for classic Westerns.

The series was novelised by Aussie author Thomas Keneally, best known for Schindler’s Ark and historical fiction. In recent years he has been collaborating with his daughter Meg on historical crime fiction, set in Van Diemen’s Land(Tasmania), during the convict era. The Moses novel was not much like the miniseries, though, and is seen from the viewpoint of a Cretan engineer who somehow ends up marrying an Israelite woman and heading for the desert with the tribe.

Well there’s a few for you. Have a happy Passover if you celebrate it and a wonderful Easter next week if you don’t.

A To Z Challenge 2021 - Theme Reveal

              

It seems everyone intending to have a go at this year’s A to Z challenge is already doing a theme reveal. So, here’s mine.

This year I will be posting about Greek myths, including books written on that theme. I’m not a folklorist by trade, but Greek myths and legends have been a passion of mine since I was in primary school. I read Robert Graves’ The Greek Myths when I was about eight or nine. Nobody told me it wasn’t for children, so I just read it - cover to cover, including the footnotes. My sister had to borrow it from a library four times before I finished. Boy, was I disappointed, a bit later, to read a children’s book of myths from my school library! 

I’m quite sure my friends were a bit confused when I told them about the Triple Goddess and the Sacred King. There will be no goddess or sacred king in this lot of posts unless you request them, just the stories and some amazing fiction I’ve read based on them. 

The real pleasure is knowing I shouldn’t have too much trouble, this year, finding a name for the X post! 

The Ides Of March...And Fiction About It

 Yesterday was the Ides of March and everyone was talking about it, both on Twitter and in the newspapers. The newspapers were talking about it because of a political stoush happening here in Melbourne; after the conservatives were wiped out in Western Australian elections on the weekend, our own conservative opposition held a leadership spill, which failed, even though the leader has a popularity rating of 15% in Victoria. But the papers and tweeters enjoyed talking about the coincidence of the date. 

Coin with Caesar on one side,Venus on the other.

And I was busy editing and pruning a story on this very subject. 

In my alternative universe, the Greek myths and some others were more or less true. More or less because various creatures from the myths roam the earth,  but are species, not the individuals from the myths. Gaius Julius Caesar is rescued from assassination by his ancestress, Venus, who leaves an automaton built for her in his place. 

But Venus, while she cares about him, wants him, in exchange, to stop special animals being rounded up and taken to Rome for the Games. 

I figured that if there were hydras, centaurs, etc, the Romans would have hunted them to extinction.

I was also intrigued by the huge success Caesar, not a physically attractive man, had with women. His lovers included patricians and Queens(not just Cleopatra). What if he had that success because the goddess of love/lust, mother of Aeneas, was his ancestor? His family did claim descent from Aeneas and Venus. 

I like this story, but I’m having to prune it savagely. Kill my darlings, so to speak. If I hadn’t written all those words I would never have finished it, so I did, but 9300 words was way too long for an anthology asking for 5000 words. I’m hoping that “around 5000 words” will be able to be stretched, but not by much. If you want to sell a story, you follow the rules. So far, I’ve cut around 3000 words, still not enough. But I may just have to rewrite altogether to get it down to even “around” 5000 words convincingly. Wish me luck! 

Creative Commons

Meanwhile, there are quite a few historical novels in which he appears as a character. Colleen McCullough’s Masters Of Rome series, for example, is a lot of thick as a brick tomes. That one is seen from the viewpoint of a number of historical characters, but Caesar is one. It starts with his parents and family. 

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is the one we all know best, of course. An interesting piece. Shakespeare’s Brutus is a decent man who feels he has to live up to his ancestor who wouldn’t allow kings to return to Rome. But Shakespeare can’t write approvingly of getting rid of a ruler, not with Elizabeth as Queen. Well, yes, there was Richard II, but I don’t imagine she was happy about that. At the end of Julius Caesar, he is honoured as the only member of the assassins who did it for the right reasons. 

Here is a link to books on this theme, reviewed on Goodreads.

https://www.goodreads.com/shelf/show/julius-caesar

He appears regularly in the Asterix comics, in which the Gauls of Asterix’s village are the only ones not conquered by the Romans. In Asterix In Britain, the Romans are able to defeat the Britons by invading on the weekend and during hot water breaks(the Britons don’t yet have tea).

Just one more which I have read was Taylor Caldwell’s A Pillar Of Iron, though the hero of that was Marcus Tullius Cicero, who was of his generation and, in this novel, goes to school with him. 

That was years ago, and she somehow managed to sneak in some Christianity before it began... 

Anyone have a favourite Julius Caesar book? Including the ones he wrote, of course!

For Women’s Day - A Few Favourites!

 In honour of International Women’s Day, here are some of my favourite heroines. These are just a few off the top of my head, there are plenty more I admire. Only one of those mentioned here is still alive, but I thought it simplest to mostly stick to historical heroines.

 Hildegard of Bingen - featured in my children’s book, Potions To Pulsars: Women Doing Science. She was an Abbess in the 11th century. As well as writing about science, she wrote what may have been the first mediaeval play, scared the hell out of (male) heads of the church, was a philosopher, a visionary, a composer who also wrote her own lyrics. You can still listen to her music, which is easily available. I have some CDs, but there is plenty on YouTube, and believe me, it’s glorious stuff! Here is a link to a YouTube post. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=G8MGiPo5IxU&list=RDEMpkCeOPHCumrjqOP395xk5A&start_radio=1 Wander over and have a listen.

 Oh, and she scored sainthood.

Ada Byron Lovelace -  The mathematical genius daughter of the poet Lord Byron. Her parents were separated early in her life, and her mother had her taught maths and science so she wouldn’t become a poet like her good-for-nothing father. Ada worked with Charles Babbage, known as the Father of the Computer. She was the world’s first computer programmer. Unfortunately she died early, of cancer. She has her own day, in October, so nice to know at least this woman has been recognised. By the way, she appears as a character in Doctor Who(Spyfall, Season 12).

Jane Austen - author of some of the best rom coms I have ever read. And whatever anyone says, I, at least, need rom coms, stories that I know will end well, in this sad world. She has influenced so many later stories, and not only ones directly based on her books. I once saw a production of Shakespeare’s rom com Much Ado About Nothing performed in Regency costume, a definite tribute to Austen’s Pride And Prejudice.

Rosalind Franklin - the British scientist who discovered the double helix of DNA in the 1950s. Unfortunately, she wanted to be sure she had it right before publishing, and a group of male competitors who had no such hesitancy used her notes to get it right and published first - and got the Nobel Prize and the credit ever since. (At one stage, these geniuses were working on a triple helix theory). She was dead by then and dead people don’t get that award, but who knows if she would have been a part of the prize if she had been alive?

She did score a play about her, Photograph 51, mentioned on my blog, in this post. https://suebursztynski.blogspot.com/2019/11/of-women-in-science-and-play-about.html 

Jocelyn Bell Burnell - Irish astrophysicist discoverer of pulsars, in 1967. She was a PhD student at the time, so the Nobel Prize went to her supervisor instead of her. She wasn’t upset about it, saying it would demean the prize to give it to a student. Still, we know who discovered pulsars. She is still around, by the way, I contacted her about my chapter about her in Potions To Pulsars. Such a nice lady! 

Do you have  any favourites? Please share.