Greta Hawes

Greek myths are entirely predictable: Actaeon offends Artemis and is hunted down by his own hounds; Pentheus refuses to worship Dionysus and is ripped apart by his mother; Antigone disobeys the king, and dies for her crime. Beginning, middle, and end: so familiar, so inevitable. The trick was never really in the plot, but in what you did with it. And what Helen Morales does with Greek myth deserves our fullest attention.

Re-visiting Delphi. The re-iteration is plain necessity: if Italo Calvino is correct and the classics can only ever be reread, then even a first-time visitor to Delphi is revisiting it. That evocative sanctuary barely clinging to the slopes of Parnassus is simultaneously place and commonplace (the Greek topos encompasses both ...