A Thin Line Between Truth and Fiction: An Exclusive Guest Post from Charlotte Higgins, Author of Greek Myths

Why does classical mythology continue to resonate with readers? It’s partly because, though they come to us from some deep, unfathomable past, they have a habit of telling us about our present. ‘History is always then; myth is now,’ novelist Pat Barker wrote recently. Myths live in a strange hinterland between truth and fiction. Say the word “myth” and you might mean something absolutely false – “a complete myth” – or something fundamentally and deeply recognisable. It’s in this contradictory territory between these two poles that myths live.

For the Greeks and Romans, myths were a universal cultural and religious currency, visible everywhere from the decoration on the vessels that people ate and drank from to the carvings of the temples they sacrificed outside; the material of their poems, plays and religious songs. The narratives have long lost the significance they had in their ancient context, but even so they’ve become part of a broad global story-language, there to be played with by authors from Shakespeare to contemporary novelists like Kamila Shamsie, Madeline Miller and Stacey Swann. They can insinuate themselves so easily into our present because there is no such thing as an “original”, canonical version of a Greek myth. The ancient myths that can be gleaned from the literature and visual culture of the Greeks and Romans are infinitely various, infinitely spiralling and contradictory, ready to be beautifully contaminated by retelling and misremembering and repurposing.

Or simply be an act of re-reading: it’s no coincidence, for example, that there has been a flowering of productions of Greek plays about the Trojan war over the past 20 years, since the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s because these dramas written 2,500 years ago have so much news to bring us about the moral contamination that comes with war, about collateral damage, about the psychic wounds that conflict inflicts on its combatants. This summer, I watched, at the National Theatre in London, a play called Paradise, which is poet and performer Kae Tempest’s version of Sophocles’ Philoctetes. Its main character is a Greek archer who has been abandoned on an island by his comrades for the 20-year duration of the Trojan war because he is wounded and useless. The play was planned well before Covid-19, but during the pandemic it felt almost absurdly relevant – a story about physical pain and isolation and loneliness. The classical myths, I’d say, are not timeless. They are always timely.