Tag Archives: Greek mythology

Cleito

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The last installment of main characters from the novel I’m currently revising is Cleito.

Cleito is a minor figure in Greek mythology.  She’s mentioned briefly by Plato in his Critias dialogues:

“Poseidon…had been awarded the isle of Atlantis, where he begat children by a mortal woman.  The island…where dwelt an aboriginal inhabitant called Evenor, who by his wife Leucippe, had a daughter called Cleito.  The girl, after the deaths of her parents, was espoused by Poseidon.”

There’s no physical description of Cleito that I can find, nor any statues or paintings of her from the ancient world era.

In some ways, that makes her portrayal more fun.  Cleito was the Queen Mother of Atlantis, but she’s left obscure, while her husband is depicted widely in mythology and artwork.  I have a blank slate from which to work.

Here are a few images I retrieved that shape my rendering of her.

 

This is the crest from the Krewe of Atlantis, a civic organization that puts on an Atlantis-themed float at New Orleans’ Mardi Gras.  Cleito is the Grecian matron on the left.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Like I said, there are no ancient world artifacts featuring Cleito, so I had to stretch my search to modern things, like this painting that advertises the “Cleito Room” at the Atlantis Guest House in Bloemfontein, South Africa.  Here she’s a mermaid, with quite a following of young mermen.

I’m not depicting Cleito as a mermaid, but she does like having men wrapped around her finger.

According to the website, the “Cleito Room” features one double bed and a shared bathroom.  A room for travelers on a budget.  Cleito would be ruined.

 

This is a painting of the goddess Amphitrite that I really like.  It’s by artist Gintare Bruzas.  Amphitrite was Poseidon’s more famous wife, so there are a whole lot more images of her than Cleito.  It comes really close to how I imagine her.

 

 

Retrieved from Dreamstime

When I started writing Cleito, I kept thinking about Maria Sharapova.  She’s kind of been my muse.  Cleito is strong-willed, physically and psychologically intimidating, tall, commanding, fashion-conscious, and she doesn’t crack a smile when she’s hard at work.  Before she shared the stage with Poseidon, she was the kingdom’s High Priestess after all.

Poseidon!!

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In keeping with a theme, I thought I’d troll around the net and post some images of Poseidon that caught my fancy.

He always comes across as a dark character in mythology.  Angry.  Spiteful.  Pretty much indifferent to human suffering.

This is a really cool sculpture of Poseidon at the Port of Copenhagen.  He’s built and mean, with his trident spear.  Not precisely how I’ve imagined him in my novel; the premise is Poseidon was a regular Neolithic guy who was idolized for political purposes.  But my portrayal is influenced by his physicality, and an inference of sadness from the ancient Greek sources.

Here’s a younger, leaner Poseidon.  It’s a famous bronze statue circa 5th century BCE Greece.  I bought a copy of it in Mykonos.  He looks more athletic, less musclebound, in these earlier renderings.

 

 

 

 

Kevin McKidd made a fine Poseidon in Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  He didn’t have the long wavy hair and beard, but he definitely had the gravitas.  And it wouldn’t seem right if Poseidon didn’t have a British accent.

 

 

 

 

 

Here’s Poseidon on a Greek postage stamp.

 

 

 

 

 

 

I like this illustration by artist Rhea Babla.  Pretty much lays out the iconography, and he’s a handsome, kind of earthy-looking dude.  You can check out Rhea’s blog, with samples of her artwork at Silver Platypus.

 

What did Dionysius look like?

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So many of you have asked for more about Dionysius after last week’s post.  [Crickets chirping]  Nonetheless, this week, I collected some of my favorite images from around the web.

Here’s a 2nd century ACE Roman statue of Dionysius, or Bacchus, copied from an earlier Hellenistic model.  I saw this one years ago at the Louvre.

There are two common versions of the god.  Like the statue here, he is sometimes depicted as a handsome, beardless young man, a derivation of the earlier, popular Greek kouros, an idol of the masculine ideal, which also seems to have been the prototype for statues of Apollo.

 

 

A Roman bust, from Tyre, provides more facial detail for Dionysius, and the depiction of a horn on his head.  Dionysius was associated with animals, and mythological hybrid creatures like the satyr.

 

 

 

I had the opportunity to see this piece at the museum of Delos, an ancient archaeological site.  It was originally a mosaic from the atrium pool of a wealthy home that has been named the House of Dionysius.  The story here is  Dionysius riding back from the East, his reputed birthplace, on a panther.  He’s seen with his common symbols – a thrysos (a pine-cone tipped staff) and a wreath of ivy.  He certainly looks androgynous here, in fact – could he be cross-dressing?

This is a glass cameo from the 1st century ACE, at the Petit Palais in Paris.  Dionysius (Bacchus) is the little child, and the description says the older man in the picture is a satyr, giving Dionysius grapes.

 

 

Here’s Caravaggio’s painting of Bacchus, where he looks especially flamboyant, yet cherubic at the same time.  It’s from the 16th century.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A painted vase by an ancient Greek artist known as Kleophrades shows an older, bearded Dionysius with a panther pelt as a cape and a cup of wine.

Why Immortals Failed

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Sci fi blog i09 recently did an article:  “The 10 Most God-Awful Movies about Greek Mythology.”

Sadly, I have to say Immortals belongs on the list.  It’s definitely worse than #10 Percy Jackson & the Olympians, which I thought was good, harmless fun; and #1 Xanadu, which — c’mon now — never aspired to be more than cult-worthy camp.

I’d even give Clash of the Titans 2010 an edge over this year’s ancient Greek Hollywood tragedy.  At least CofT had a lot of great action sequences.

Immortals is loosely, woefully loosely, based on the story of Theseus, the demi-god founder of Athens, who famously slayed the Cretan Minotaur.  Nonsensical liberties with the source material was where the problems started for me.

Theseus is supposed to be the son of Poseidon, but in the movie he’s the son of Zeus.  His mother was the daughter of royalty, and the wife to a nobleman.  Immortals has his mother as an outcast peasant.  It seemed to me a dumb contrivance to cast Theseus as an underdog the audience *has to* get behind, and already I was annoyed.

Then, the movie muddles the story of the gods vs. the titans.  Here the gods — of whom there are curiously few — have defeated and banished the titans to imprisonment inside Mount Tartarus in a storyline that has more in common with Christian mythology (the exile of fallen angels) than anything ancient world-related.  The titans can be freed by a lost artifact called the Epirus bow (derivation unknown).  It’s a cool weapon, but what does it have to do with anything ancient Greek?

I won’t get bogged down in the other confusing details, because the greater transgression of the film is co-opting Greek mythology for a modern, Christian message.  Like the Clash of the Titans reboot, Zeus is basically the Christian Holy Father done up in Greek fantasy stylings.  It’s a story of good vs. evil, which has no place in the Greek belief system.  The gods were mercurial, ruthless at times, forgiving at others, most definitely to be feared, but flawed by jealousy and pride.  Their stories, their characters, were a reflection of human troubles.

When filmmakers portray that world with a Christian sensibility, they miss the point.  The stories of Theseus and other heroes weren’t about smiting evil and restoring humanity’s belief in a higher power.  They were about claiming glory in a ruthless world, and rarely were there happy endings.  Even after their amazing triumphs – Perseus fulfilling his destiny by slaying the gorgon Medusa or Jason returning with the Golden Fleece — the heroes are typically dogged by tragedy.  Perseus accidentally killed his grandfather, and went into a self-imposed exile.  Jason returned from his adventures to be killed by his wife.  The moral is that glory is fleeting.  There are no absolutes.  Good men come to bitter ends.  The gods keep us all in line.

On the plus side, I felt that Henry Cavill does a decent job as a low-key, reluctant hero, and his fighting sequences were fun to watch.  The costuming for the gods is delightfully over-the-top and sexy.  Mickey Rourke is a suitable dreadful villain (Hyperion) but his gravelly muttering bothered me in this instance.  Stephen Dorff is wasted as a disposable clichéd character – Theseus’ horny anti-establishment sidekick.  And the United Nations of Oracles — a quartet led by Slumdog Millionaire’s Freida Pinto — are just plain ridiculous.

I think a little more 300-style homoeroticism could’ve compensated for a general lack of inspiration.  But at least the men’s breastplates have nipples.

Studying Heroic Fantasy: David Gemmell’s Lord of the Silver Bow

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Three posts in as many days?  How do I explain.  I think it’s part neurotic overcompensation (I won’t be posting again until the week of August 14th) and part pre-Writers Retreat mania.  Anyway, I’ve been working on this review for a little over a week, it’s done, so I’m posting it.

Trying to catch up on recent ancient world fantasy, I picked up David Gemmel’s Lord of the Silver Bow.   It’s the first book in Gemmell’s Troy trilogy, which reimagines the famed conflict between Mykene Greece and Troy, this time from the Trojans’ perspective.   A British author, Gemmell died in 2006.

Who am I to critique Gemmell, one of the most prolific and popular writers of heroic fantasy?   My study of the genre is growing, but still spotty, and I have two unpublished historical fantasy manuscripts to my name.   So take this review as the perspective of one writer, one reader with an interest in the time period, and the mythology, and a preference for great characters and stories that illuminate our state of being, triumphant and horrifying as it is.

Lord of the Silver Bow casts Aeneas—Gemmell calls him by his childhood name Helikaon—as a respected military hero, and a reluctant politician.   He abdicated his claim to the kingdom of Dardania, a strategic ally of Troy, because he blamed his tyrannical father for his mother’s suicide.

The central story concerns how Helikaon will find his way in a brutal world that’s undergoing rapid political changes, and switched alliances, including those that guide who he can or cannot marry.   When he falls in love with his Trojan cousin Hektor’s bride-to-be Andromache, he’s caught in a familiar bind: will he follow his heart or follow his duty?

Adding to the tension, Helikaon is being targeted for assassination by a multi-national pact to avenge the death of a popular Greek war hero.

I found that the story shone brightest when portraying the complexity of human nature.   Warriors commit merciless acts, yet they are fiercely protective, even tender toward their family and comrades.

One chapter concerns a mercenary who murdered Helikaon’s half-brother and raped his stepmother.   Hard to portray a rapist in a textured  way, but I feel that Gemmell succeeds by telling the story from the mercenary’s point-of-view.   There’s no apology or circumspection, but I thought it was a realistic portrayal of a ruthless military lifestyle in which the choices are to kill or be killed; and the men therein guard their place, and loved ones, by a vicious cycle of ever-increasing violence.

It’s the character contradictions that make for the most interesting reading here.   Bound by a code of honor to refrain from violence as a guest at a foreign feast, Argurios, a Mykene, a natural enemy of Helikaon, slays a pair of his countrymen when they try to assassinate the prince.   A master assassin proudly reflects on having made his way by killing men, but per a priest’s advice, he will only carry out his vocation from Spring to Autumn so as not to displease the god of the Underworld.   Beliefs around religion, ethics, morality are evocative of an ancient time, yet the questions and struggles resonate well today.   Is there ever honor in violence?   Can a man who commits monstrous acts be redeemed?

Less successful for me was the narrative structure.   The story changes point of view every single chapter, with over two dozen character perspectives represented, and many of them are minor characters rarely or never to be heard from again.  Each chapter feels satisfyingly complete, a nice short story in itself.   But early on, I found myself wondering:   who and what is this story about?   Ostensibly, it’s Helikaon’s journey, but he disappears for such lengths of time, I didn’t fully engage with him.

The length is also daunting for a story that only lasts a week or so: nearly 500 pages!   There were times I slugged through it rather than enjoyed it.

Another weak spot was the romance.   Part of the problem relates to the above, not enough focus on the couple we’re supposed to care about:   Helikaon and Andromache.   But I didn’t trust that the author had it in him to create a compelling love story anyway.   There’s a cliched love-at-first-sight meeting (forgivable if there’s an intriguing follow up), but it was kind of like trying to root on the two most popular kids in school.   Helikaon and Andromache are treated so generously, I didn’t really care if they ended up together.   Slightly more compelling is the counterpart love story between the hardened, exiled Mykene warrior Argurios, and always-the-bridesmaid-never-the-bride princess Laodike.

But most regrettable was the portrayal of Andromache’s bisexuality.   It’s a facet of the story that appears to exist solely to titillate non-gay readers.   There’s no depth to Andromache’s (supposed) affair with another woman from her wild lesbian-segregated past, and meeting Helikaon, of course, “straightens” her out anyway.

So, I give Lord of the Silver Bow three stars or maybe a B-.   I don’t know that I will read more in the series.  On one hand, there’s terrific rendering of the ancient world setting and sensibility.   But there’s room for improvement in character development and the complexity of romantic themes.