 yng Nghymru, o'r llwyddiad yr ystyried bwysig y Llywodraeth Brithy, gyda'r llwyddiad arall, o'r gweithio'r gweithio, ydy'r stachau o mylion o bosb ac argyrchu o gweithio, ac y gallu'r gallu Llywodraeth, yn ystynnu, na fydden nhw'n gyda'u llwyddiad. Felly ym ymweithio'r llwyddiad ar y cwrtwchol ar ddeiniol, I gael i weithio allanod o gwaith arno ffyrdd i'r ffyrdd i'r ffyrdd mwy yn fwy o ddweud, o'n gwneud i'r bwbl o gwbl o fynd i hollu, a o'r gwaith o'r eye o'r cyffredin, o'n gwybod. Mae'n cael ei chyfyddon o'r wneud o'r Llyfrgell Llyfrgell. Mae'n hwn o'n gweithio oherwydd na Natalia Haines'n bofynol i'r stori mwy o Chyfyddo. perhaps the best-known and most wildly interpreted of the Greek myths. Medusia is something of a Rorschach test. A random sprinkling of quotes has Helen Sicsou, the French feminist, saying she's not deadly, she's beautiful and she's laughing. For Donatella Versace, Medusia is a symbol, it's about going all the way. And for Caroline Duffy speaks through her in the lines, there are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified? And Freud thought it was all about castration. Well, if you want the truth, you really need to buy this book. Now, please welcome to the stage Natalie and Monique. Natalie, we will be joined shortly by Lisa Dewan. Natalie is with our chair, Monique Roffi. Now, Monique is... Please welcome, Monique, before my snakes wiggle off again. Feel free to avail yourselves of these snakey head dresses, everybody. Monique is very beloved of the British Library. She's a multi-award-winning writer, whose most recent novel, The Mermaid of Black Conch, was the costa book of the year 2020. It's an unforgettable book. I love it. And it's also on sale tonight. Knock yourself out and buy both. There will be time for questions later, both here and for our online audience. And our signature drink of the evening is, of course, snake bite and black. Do you see what we did there? But for now, please join me and one more welcome for Natalie and Monique. Hi. Good evening. Thank you for coming. It's such a pleasure to be here. I am so excited by Natalie's book. Before we kick off, I'm just going to introduce Natalie and Lisa, who are both, gosh, between them, got so many accolades. I think Lisa's going to read to start with. Yes, please. I'll introduce Lisa. Lisa Dwan is an Irish performer and writer. She stars in the Top Boy and Bloodline series, and her theatre work includes a one-woman production of an adaptation of Samuel Beckett's Knows Knife. Dwan writes and teaches on theatre, culture, gender, and Beckett. She is a visiting professor at Princeton University and was artist in residence at Columbia University, where she developed a new theatre piece with Margaret Atwood, based on Madea. And Natalie Haynes is a writer and broadcaster. According to The Washington Post, a rock star mythologist. Someone's got to be. Yes. How many of those do we know? Her previous books are The Amber Fury, The Ancient Guide to Modern Life, The Children of Jocosta, A Thousand Ships, which was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, and Pandora's Jar, Women in Greek Myth. Six series of her show, Natalie Haynes stands up for the classics, has been broadcast on Radio 4, all available on BBC South. So can you give it up for Natalie and Lisa? Your reality liked humans. She knew Steno preferred to avoid them finding their fragility strange and unpleasant, but even before Medusa came to them, your reality used to fly inland and watch them. She liked the way they were so prone to anxiety and haste. She liked the houses they made for themselves to sleep inside. She liked the huge temples they managed to build. She would return to the coast to tell Steno of all she had seen, but she knew her sister was only listening because she was kind. But Medusa was different. She asked for the stories over and over again, correcting your reality if she changed any detail. She pestered both sisters to be allowed to see people whenever she could. She loved seeing children, just as she loved it when their horned sheep produced lambs, and as she had grown older, her love for mortals only increased. They don't even have wings, Steno said one morning when Medusa was pleading for the three of them to go and see the new temple, which had been built a little way along the coast. The Gorgans could see it from their top of their own rocky heights that was on a loft here promontory. I wonder how they got the columns up so high. We could ask them if we went to look, Medusa said, please, not today, Steno said. There are things I need to do today, but another day, Uri Alley said. The sheep needed milking, and she had a feeling one of them was sickening with something. She had penned the little creature away from the others on the far side of the shore. I could go on my own, Medusa said. Her sisters looked at one another. She could go on her own. She was of an age when humans did things alone, Uri Alley realised, and although it took a physical effort to remember, she was no longer a baby. How many summers have you been here, Stenoise suspicious? I remember 13, Medusa said. How many do you remember, she asked Uri Alley. Three more, Uri Alley said after a moment of counting. She thought of her flock of sheep growing through the years, the first lambs, the first debts. She remembered Medusa being there each time. Crawling, then standing, then walking unsteadily, then running. Yes, she nodded to her sceptical sister she has, but with us for 16 summers. If I was mortal, my parents would let me go and see a temple, Medusa said, turning from one sister to the other. Please, I think they're starting another one. I'm sure I saw them marking out the space I want to see. Medusa wasn't afraid to be travelling alone. She was often on her own in the caves where they lived, or on the rocks around their patch of the shore. She was never far from her sisters, and she enjoyed the brief sense of solitude she felt when she left them behind. She unfurled her wings and flew the shore distance to the temple precincts. Now she was close to it. She was even more dazzled by the ingenuity and grandeur. Vast, sturdy columns were topped by a brightly painted frieze, and Medusa wondered how mortals standing at their base would ever be able to see the story of the war between the gods and the titans. A story her sisters had told her many times without craning their necks. The whole edifice seemed to have been designed to be admired by someone who could fly. She fluttered up to look more closely at the painted figures, which ran all the way around the outside edge of the roof. The blues, reds and yellows, each catching her eye in turn. She followed the story around, panel by panel, the titans rising up against Zeus, the Olympian gods banding together to subdue them. When she landed back on the ground, she wondered where the mortals were. She could see none. She wanted to look inside the temple, but Steno had taught her to be careful of scaring humans who were apt to scream and run away if they saw a gorgon. Perhaps they had already seen her approaching the temple and hidden. Still, she stood behind a column and pushed open one wooden door just a little, hoping not to alarm anyone. She peered inside her eyes accustomed to the darkness of her cave. She saw a pair of bright, unblinking eyes staring right at her, and she gasped before realising they belonged to a statue. She smiled as she pushed the door further and stepped inside. The statue was so impressive. No wonder it had made her jump. The goddess sat proudly on her grand chair, her skin glowing white, her helmet spear and shield painted gold. Her eyes were remarkable. Matousa didn't know what could have made them such a piercing blue. She'd never seen such a thing, and yet she knew it was such a perfect likeness that the goddess had just such eyes herself. She crept a little closer, admired the drapery of the statue's dress, reached out to touch it, but pulled her hand back when she heard a noise behind her. Don't stop on my account. I must say it's a rather good likeness of my niece. Matousa turned to see who was speaking. A tall, well-muscled man was standing in the shadows of the colonnade by the tours she had just used. He must have been waiting to follow her in, she thought, when he could have simply have spoken to her outside. He had long black hair curling down past his neck. His eyes were dark green and cold. Your niece, she said. Is that who that is? Of course, he replied. That is Athenae. Can't you tell from the helmet and the spear? I didn't know she had those, Matousa said. My sisters don't always mention what people are wearing when they tell the stories. He laughed, but she could tell the laughter was false. It did not sound like Steno laughing when she caught herself doing something ridiculous, or when Uri Ali was entertained by the antics of their sheep, it sounded like Matousa's search for the words to define something unfamiliar. Like the laughter of someone who wanted to be thought amused, though they were not. Why are you pretending to laugh? She asked. The man stopped laughing immediately. I wasn't laughing at your sisters. He said, you weren't laughing at all, she replied. I was thinking how funny it is. He continued as though she had not spoken. That you are the daughter of a sea god and sea goddess, and yet you only know your immortal kin through stories. Matousa did not know what to say to this, since the man was lying to her and she had no idea why. She found herself suddenly wishing that Uri Ali had left her sheep for a while and come with her, or that the priestess of the mighty goddess Athenae were present, or that the tall man wasn't so close to the door. How do you think I should know them, she said? She moved to the side of the statue and the man moved silently in the same direction so the distance between them was lessened. I think your sister should have taken you to Mount Olympus to meet your ethereal family, he said, or perhaps they could have brought you to my kingdom instead. My borders lap up against your shore after all. Are you my father? she asked, and this time his laughter was real, but again it sounded wrong. She realised because it was tinged with contempt. No child. Forcus is a very minor god compared to his king. Poseidon, she said. Don't you usually have a trident? Do I need one? He asked. I thought your sister didn't mention what gods were in Cary. She stared at him, wondering why he didn't like her sisters. Ah, I don't know what she used it for, she said. Attacking titans, he replied. You saw me on the freeze outside. That's why you don't have it then, because the titans were overthrown exactly. So now I only carry it because I'm used to it, he said, but sometimes it gets in the way. When you visit temples to look at your niece, that's not quite why I'm here. Medusa opened her mouth to ask why he was here before realising she didn't at all want to know the answer. What's she like? She asked instead. Athuni, she's, he thought for a moment, she's sharp. Sharp-eyed, like you see here, sharp tongue-dwarf and sharp-edged. She's quick to take offence and ruthless when she takes revenge. Zeus spoils her and it makes her less pleasant than she might otherwise be. She's quick to go crying to him if she doesn't get her way. Medusa looked back at the statue. I wonder what she'd say about you, she said. I'm sure she would say that I'm handsome and charming and you should stop wondering if you could reach the door before I reached you, because you already know the answer is no. There was absolute silence. Medusa thought of the sheep and the eagle that had tried to steal one and again she wished your reality was with her now. It wouldn't make any difference anyway, would it? she said. Not really. He replied, I am wherever the sea is and you can't be with your sisters all the time. So what happens now? Now? You submit to a power greater than your own. Medusa was never aware of it when she was with her sisters because there was always the sound of the sea and the wind and the gulls and the cormorants and their flop. But in this silent space she was conscious of being the only one whose breath could be heard. It made her feel weak. What if I don't want to? she asked. You will want to? he shrugged. Why wouldn't you want to? I am one of the Olympian gods. You should feel honour that I am singling you out in such a way. It's a privilege you have done nothing to earn. I've seen you and decided to bestow my favour upon you. It wouldn't occur to you not to want to. It will occur to you to say thank you, I suppose. Medusa could not say why she suddenly felt less afraid though her dislike of the god was in no way diminished. It was perhaps because of his tremendous self-regard which meant that even though he was so much more powerful than her and so intent on exploiting the disparity between them she felt rather sorry for him. Imagine being a god, she thought, and still needing to tell everyone how impressive you were. You caused the earthquakes, she said, that make the sand shimmer on the shore. I struck my trident on the bed of the sea, he agreed, and the earth trembles at my command. Why do you do it? she asked. Again, she thought she saw a glint of weakness as Poseidon straightened his back but somehow managed to look still slightly shorter. Because I can. Could you smash this temple and send a tumbling into the sea? she asked. He nodded. All the columns would shatter and the roof would collapse, he said. Although it's probably too far from the edge of the clifer to fall into the sea. The columns might roll, I suppose. I'm not asking you to prove it. I don't need to prove it, he snapped. The humans are building my temple now to Poseidon Earthshaker. You must have seen the site as you flew here. Oh, is that going to be a temple to you? she asked. I wonder why they did this one first. I imagine they were honing their skills, he said. Do you think so? I would have thought they would do the most important gods first but then I suppose they would have built one for Zeus first, wouldn't they? Not necessarily. Not everyone thinks Zeus is the god the most worthy of honour. Oh, don't they? No. Sea-faring people have always built temples to my majesty. Yes. I suppose sea-faring people would these people obviously value you because they're building you a temple now. Of course. I suppose they just honoured your niece first because they value her skills and perhaps they don't travel much by sea. They have little need to travel anywhere, he said. Their land is fertile and their livestock are strong. Perhaps they should build a temple to demeat her next. You're trying to make me angry. I wouldn't have thought I had that power. He stared at her, his green eyes glittering in the half light. I'm beginning to wonder if you do. Where did you learn to be so brazen? I didn't know I was, she said. And I'm sure you know the answer already since you seem to have been watching me. My sisters taught me to be like them. But you aren't like them, are you? You don't have their physical power. You don't have their immortality. There's only a pair of wings differentiating you from any other girl. Your sisters are monsters with their tusks and their snaking mains of hair. You are very little in common with them at all. My sisters aren't monsters. This, then, explained why he did not like them. He was appalled by their appearance. Medusa wanted to laugh but she was still afraid. As if any thing that was important about Steno or Uri Ali was visible in their teeth or their hair. Aren't you loyal, he said? Can love really have blinded you so much? You're the one who's blind if you can't see anything beyond a pair of tusks. Uri Ali has two sets of tusks, I believe. It doesn't matter what you believe, she replied. You cannot possibly fail to see what anyone else could see. Why do you think I picked you and not one of your sisters? You know you are beautiful, you know they are not. I know that when you talk of beauty, you mean something different from what I mean. I see he took a step towards her and she forced herself not to take a step back. So what do you mean by beauty, little Gorgon? Uri Ali tends to every one of her sheep like it is a child. Steno learned to cook so that she could feed me when I was little. They care about me and they protect me. That is beauty. Neither of them is protecting you now. You waited until I was alone. I did very well. If these qualities are so valuable to you, if you really claim to believe that caring and tending are beautiful, when it is so common it is not even limited to humans, any animal cares for its young, then prove it. How? Come here, he said, and he strode towards her grabbing her hand. She wanted to pull away from him, but she knew immediately that however strong she was, he was much stronger. There was a claminess to his touch, a smell of seaweed emanating from his skin. He dragged her to the columns closest to the sea and pushed his hand against her back, forcing her to look across the wide promontory. Look, he said, out there towards my temple. What do you see? She was sure the group of girls had not been there when she entered Athenae's temple. You already know what I can see, she said. I see a group of girls talking and laughing together. Are they beautiful? Yes, she replied. Why? Because they are young and happy and together, she said. She could feel the irritation in the fingers that pressed against her. They are ordinary, look again. And she did as he demanded, but she could not see what he saw. It's because you've spent all of these years with no one but your sisters for company. If you'd grown up with other girls your own age, if I had grown up with other girls my own age, you would have thought me ordinary too. Not true, he said. I would have admired those ringlets and those arching eyebrows. I would have approved of your long straight nose and the way your wide mouth is ready to smile. I would have desired you in just the same way if you'd grown up among all these girls. You would still have been extraordinary. You were just guessing, she said. You can't know that, you just think I want to hear it. She felt the tension in the muscles that held her as she said it and she knew she was right. He was so very sure of his own charm. But I don't. Very well, he replied. Have it your way. You're nothing more than an ordinary girl with ordinary immortal sisters. And everyone is equally beautiful because you say so. Is that right? He grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her to face him. She could feel the pillar pressing against her back and the smell of salt and anger on his face. You value them all so highly. You think that caring for the weak is so important. Prove it to me and to yourself. She stared at his dark green eyes and loathed him. You can't prove what you believe, she said. You can only believe it. That is obviously not true, he said. You believe you can fly and I believe it too. We could prove it by taking you to the edge of the cliff and pushing you off it. Flying isn't a matter of opinion, she said, nor is beauty. I don't agree with you. He leaned close and hissed into her mouth. I will take one of those girls, Medusa. Anyone you can choose, I will take her to the deepest part of the ocean and I will have her until she drowns. Do you understand? I will rape her and she will die of it because that is what it means to be weak. They will knock down your temple and never worship you again. Men will worship me across the world, he shrugged. These ones hardly matter. She saw all his vanity and pettiness and wondered why. Mortals worshiped Annie God like this. Or he said, look at me. She could not bring herself to meet his eyes. But he reached out and took her chin, held her face so that she could not look away. Or I will have you. Here, now, in the temple, you've made your disdain for the idea quite clear. So let us see how much you love these mortals, how much you value caring for the weak like your sisters do. She stared at him in disgust. If I agree to this, you leave them all alone, he shrugged. I might. Then yes, she said, they will never repay your affection. Do you understand? She nodded. They will fear you and flee you and call you a monster just like they do your sisters. It doesn't matter what they think of me. Then why do you want to protect them? Because I can. She said. I've got so many questions, but I didn't realise that one of my firsts would be writer to writer, which is, it's interesting. Do you find it interesting like you did that? You wrote that? Yeah. Do you kind of go, oh, that's... That's what that should sound like. Yeah, it's a bit awkward because I did the audio book. Yeah, no, Lisa is the third person to perform it because it's being done on Radio 4 as a book at bedtime. At the moment. Gosh. And I did the audio book. And when we planned this event way back in, I can't remember, March or something, Lisa was the first person I wanted them to ask. I should say I didn't get to cast Radio 4's brilliant, brilliant Susanna Fielding to do a bridged version there, but I sure would have. But Lisa was... I've seen Lisa perform on stage a couple of times and once, I've had a private performance from Lisa over Zoom because I did a guest lecture for her students when we were all locked down and she read a bit of Medea. Honestly, I wasn't the same for weeks afterwards. So, yeah, I knew that she would see a part of the story that I hadn't seen even if I'd written. And I was right. I'm glad I didn't hear her rehearse. Another question I haven't planned is, is just in the green room, you said that there isn't much of the story of Medusa. That's true. It's actually quite a small story, yet here we've got this incredible... You've just developed it and gone somewhere that feels just mesmerising and really big. Talk about, again, that's kind of the miracle of imagination. We've got so much now in this book. Yeah, I hope so. I mean, she's a huge iconographic symbol in the ancient world. So Gorgonair, the Gorgon heads appear all over, almost all ancient cultures. Heads or masks appear everywhere. They're usually apatropaic. They're meant to protect us. In the case of Gorgons, I think probably from the natural world because of all the snakes for hair, snakes are dangerous. It looks like a lion's mane, lions are dangerous. They have these big, wide mouths. They're associated etymologically with the notion of thunder and therefore lightning, dangerous. Tusks, boars are dangerous, wild boar are dangerous. And so they serve this kind of protective role and I felt like that had really been lost because we tend to think of them as monsters. And I think we see them from the outside. You know, look at that scary monster that could turn me to stone. Whereas conversely, for example, we look at someone like Midas who could kill you just as easily by turning you to gold. We look at it from the inside. We're like, oh, poor Midas. It would be awful if everything I touched turned to gold and I couldn't eat or drink. And so that kind of central tension, why do we look at his story from the inside? Why do we look at hers from the outside? We're really where I kind of started out. But no, there's a narrative version of the story of Medusa or Perseus in Ovid's Metamorphoses. But it's largely focused on Perseus. Everyone dies of surprise. There are brief mentions of her in Pindar, in Hesiod and in a few other sources. But there's really not a lot. What you get is loads of vase paintings. So you get lots of snapshots of the story. And it felt like, therefore, it was up to me to turn it into a long narrative. And then up to people who perform it, someone like Lisa, to find all the depth inside that narrative. I mean, one of the lines from that is, why do we worship gods like this? And I think something about the inherent misogyny in this world and these gods are sociopaths and narcissists. And Lisa really captured that sort of note. And yet there's so little revision. These stories are kind of frozen. And they are kind of, we see the word, the names of the gods everywhere all the time. No one's really shaken up. They're not to be shaken up, but that's what you're doing. And I kind of wanted to ask you, why is revision necessary of these stories and especially feminist revision? Well, because they were revised for a really long time, and then I think we sort of lost our way a little bit for reasons that I'm not entirely sure of, except that people stop believing in gods like that, I suppose. But I'm not really sure how you believed in those gods to begin with, because it's really difficult. People ask me the question quite a lot. It's like, does Socrates believe in Zeus and Hera squabbling on Mount Olympus? Because that seems, and it's like, well, I can't answer that for you. The question of how do we consider piety is one that's been being asked since the fourth century BC. There's a Plato dialogue called the Euthafro. And the question is, what's pious? What's something kind of godly? Is it things that the gods love that make them godly, or is it the other way around? Do they become godly because the gods already love them? And so is it a freestanding godliness, and that's why the gods love them, because they're created on their carious affections. But the Euthafro, who's in dialogue with Socrates, says, oh, well, you know, we love whatever the gods love. And then the question comes back, well, what about when the gods don't agree? So this is a question that's been being asked. You know, in the Iliad, the gods are squabbling the entire time. And that's, you know, the Homeric versions. That's late 8th, early 7th century BCE. And they never agree on anything. Hera's always trying to trick Zeus. He's really violent towards her. He's an abusive husband. He's an abusive relationship. Most gods' relationships are abusive by any modern standards, and indeed sometimes by ancient standards. If I stand up for his mum and he gets thrown off Mount Olympus, that's just abuse. I hear you, but I still think in terms of sort of, there's lots of strong women, for example, in these stories. Everybody's really strong. Everyone's capable of incredible strength. But yet, you know, for example, in this story, it's Athenae who basically curses Medusa. Where are the conscious feminists in... Are there any conscious feminists? I have terrible news for you. Are there any conscious feminists in the classical world? Not as much as you might hope. I mean, there are some unconscious feminism going on. For example, the great monologue that Medea delivers at the beginning of Euripides' version of her story is so extraordinary on the subject of how awful it is to be a woman in a loveless marriage to a terrible man, and the condition of women in general being disadvantaged relative to men, that it was still being read at suffrage meetings 110 years ago. That was written by a man. It was performed by a man wearing a mask, almost certainly to an audience of just men whose wives were locked up at home, basically. And yet it's an extraordinary discursus on women's lives. And Euripides does that more than once. There's an incredible moment in the Phoenician women where Jacasta talks about having had her baby taken from her and given to another woman. And she uses such physical language. She says, she nursed the child my labor pains produced. It's like, how do you know that when you would never have seen a woman give birth? Because that would be dealt with by midwives and women. And you'd be outside in the men's quarters. You wouldn't be anywhere near your wife because you were rich and therefore... And how would you know about milk when wet nurses existed and wives wouldn't have been... How did you know? How did you know her body would ache for this baby? How did you know that another woman's body would respond to it like that? Maybe it was a female... It cannot have been, alas, there is evidence for Euripides all over the shop. So, yeah, he's real, I'm afraid, and he's definitely a man. So, an Aristophanes play called The Poet and the Women, he does disguise himself as a woman to escape the furious women of Athens because he's been so rude about them. So, maybe. There is that sort of sojourner-truth kind of eight-eye woman. This is what women... This is the pain we go through. This is who we are. It does exist. It does exist, but it would be revisionist beyond where I'm prepared to go and I'll go quite a long way and call him a feminist. But I will go a long way for it. I would... I consider Euripides a feminist writer, but I for sure wouldn't call him a feminist. OK. So, when I read that chapter myself, I think one of the things that stood out for me was just one line, which was something to do with his sort of fishy... his clammy hand. And I thought, I don't know why I just thought that was just a sort of exquisite detail because obviously this is a kind of Harvey Weinstein of... This is a... I've cornered you in my temple. Ha ha ha. I've got you now. And it's just so loaded with... Gosh, you know, that this is... this is what's going to happen to this girl, but she's answering back. She's answering back. You've filled in all the gaps and yet this is a contemporary scenario. Can you talk a bit about, yeah, the... Have we evolved? Have we evolved? I mean, I think some of us have evolved, but for sure some of us have not. And you know, it's that thing where... Was there Harvey Weinstein in this when you were thinking about Poseidon? Of course I was thinking about him. How can you not? You know, there's a scene later where he's sort of sunning himself on a rock and kind of admiring himself. And at the same time, there's this sort of tiny voice of self-doubt which my Olympian diet is very rarely experienced, but occasionally do. Where he wonders what he would look like to a critical female eye. And it makes him really... He gets suddenly really like... Something's wrong. You know, he's like, I look so lush and marvellous and godly and then he's like, Do I look like a horrible fat seal? Yes. And then he's like, No, no, I'm lush. And then he can just... This female voice of criticism. It's that great, incredible Margaret Atwood line that informs everything all of us right and I suppose that men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them. Yes. And that's doubly true with male gods at least the way that I write them. But yeah, absolutely. That sense of enormous self-regard with that constant tiny voice at the back of it saying she thinks you're disgusting. It seems to me having never met him and hoping never to exactly how the Harvey Weinstein's of this world operate. Yeah. Totally. There's something... This is really funny. There's loads of great one-liners. And very contemporary. And as you just said, something about the awareness of it being a feminist of today. And this, for me, invigorates the story. It's not just a retelling in terms of plot or you've done different things but in form throughout in your narrative choices in one particular bit, which I'm not allowed to talk about because it's a spoiler. But there's so much going on here but for me what I liked most about it was just this kind of lightness. It's dancing and it's just very relatable as Lisa just brought it to life. The awareness, it's like, what do you mean? What are you talking about? The female consciousness is so at odds to the patrician. This is how things are and she's just like, I'm not getting this at all. Can you talk a bit about that? Yeah, I mean, I think, I'm glad that it's a funny book and certainly structurally it's quite a playful book. I love a polyphonic novel. I love changing voices all the time and I'm fearless in the face of maybe this chapter should be narrated by an olive grove or by a crow. Or by a reed. Or a reed. Or whatever. You know, whoever we need will step up and do the job. And it was really the hardest thing actually was trying to keep the tone sort of moving like that in a kind of, it should feel like a wave breaking on a shore because I didn't want to kind of slam you into a wall when it goes from comedy to tragedy quite often and quite quickly and it's like, have I held this tone enough for you to come with me here? I did feel I was in safe hands. I didn't know that you knew. I always thought she knows what's coming. I did know. I did feel I was in safe hands. I did know that it was very pacy because there's so much drama. So much drama. It's a page to it. Because I love Aristotle's paretics. So again, you said that it's a small story but this is not a small story. There's lots going on here and you've kind of weaved perseus, andromeda, Ethiopians, the Danai, the Griai. There's so much. You've just sort of weaved a world and it's because you know this world and I was like, oh, okay. There's real confident storytelling here. I guess I wanted to ask you and there's a terrible thing that happens and I can't say. I wept in the middle of this book. It's terrible. What you decided to do with this in the centre of this book. What you decided to do with this I think is kind of important piece of contemporary feminism, if I'm honest. I was just like, you know, you kind of, as a writer to writer, sometimes books just make me stop. Sometimes I want to throw it on the ground. Sometimes I have to go make a cut. I kind of had those reactions to that bit. Can you talk a bit about your thinking about what you wanted to do. Maybe even towards that part or weaving these stories together and you've spent a lot of time with the sisters. It's a story of friendship, of sisterhood, of caring, of family, of how these strange creatures live together in a cave and how she's cared for and she's not mortal. So you do a lot of, we invest, invest, invest in what's really going on between these sisters. Which makes what happens incredibly tragic. How did you get all of that from such a small story? I know you mentioned that you wrote this in lockdown. Yeah, I did. I mean, I feel really bad saying this because my mom's here tonight. But during the second or third lockdown I've lost track now. I started this book in sort of November December time of 20 and then wrote it through to September of 21. So for a really long chunk of that time, the first, at least half of that first draft, we couldn't see each other. I couldn't see my mom. She's 100 miles away. I couldn't see my brother and sister-in-law and niece they're 20 miles the other way. My dad was in 100 miles the other way. So I basically wrote myself a new family to keep me company. And then obviously realised they were really great company and I slightly preferred them to my, not my mom. So that was sort of part of it. And then I think the scene that is so harrowing in the middle, I guess it's probably not a spoiler to tell you that Perseus and Medusa are on a collision course because it's the most famous part of her story. And obviously there's a gorgon head on the front cover. I mean, I can't get round it. But narrating that part, which was I think the question you asked me before the mic went out, I had planned for a while to do the thing that I chose to. And I texted my friend Robert. We text each other every day once just to check in. I texted my friend Robert and said, I'm thinking of narrating the beheading scene like this. Is that insane? And we text every day but we hardly ever speak any other way. It's just like one message to and fro. I sent him a picture, he sends a reply. And not a smutty picture, don't get ideas. And he rang me. He just rang me straight back and said, you have to do this. That's absolutely what you should do. Not just how in form, but did he also say this is what you're going to do? I said, can I do this thing with this thing, with this chorus of these characters? And he rang me and said, yes, do it right now. And we talked for about 20 minutes. He said they should be a bachetian chorus, Lisa. So I don't know if they are. You're going to win a prize for that. Again, there's a writer to writer. There's only now and again, you just put something down and you go, I wish I'd written that. That's an amazing piece of writing. You've met contemporary classic, out of classic writing. It's just an amazing piece of writing. The kind of thing I'm going to show my creative writing student. Shut up, you'll make me cry again. It's really great. We can't talk about it. You're going to have to buy the book. I don't want to spoil it. It's such a long way through. It is one of the best pieces of writing I've seen for a long time. It's a bit of a... It's a kind of hat trick. It's a good bad thing. And part of me, when I stopped reading and thought, I wonder if that's the story you wanted to tell right from the word go. Yes, it was. Exactly. I think we should just tell them what it is. It's one of those goose bump things. I feel weird now. You want to tell? All right. You tell. So what I wanted to do for a really long time was write the scene where Perseus decapitates Medusa from the perspective of the snakes that are her hair. Because I thought it would be cool. And also that I couldn't imagine that anyone else would ever have done it. And that's always the thing when you kind of try and encounter these narratives anew, is that you want to make them... You want to... You know, you asked me earlier about the kind of revising it in a feminist light. And it's sort of... It's impossible not to do that now. It's like, this is the 21st century. I am a feminist. Whatever I write is going to affect that. When people say, did you set out to write a feminist book? Well, I set out to be a feminist and write a book. So, yeah, I guess so. I breathe feminist air by that rationale. So, yeah, you know, in my feminist way. I'm just going for my feminist walk. So there's an element of that. OK, but it's not just the snakes that is like, this is really cool. But can I say this? I don't know. You're going to give away the end of that chapter. With the bit that... Thank goodness you don't have a microphone on, Monique. Can I say? Well, that he kills her when she's asleep. He kills her when she's asleep. I mean, I just want to... Kill her when she's asleep. Yeah, he does. Throw myself on the floor and just like, that's the end of my day. I can't read it. I'm not doing anything anymore now. Yeah, and I didn't... When did you think of that? I didn't have to. It's on of ours in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Is it? It is. It's a hydria, right? It's about 50 centimetres tall. And it is the most beautiful picture of her. She's very unusually at this stage in the story. She's a beautiful young woman because it's the fifth century and they make monsters pretty. Before that you'll get gorgons with big wide mouths and tusks and everything. After that, they all look like beautiful women. All monsters get more pretty in the fifth century. Everyone gets prettier. And so she's a beautiful young woman at the moment when she's killed, which she doesn't seem to have snakes for her. Beautiful wringlets, I might add. And she's asleep and Perseus is sneaking up on her. And there's no other word for it. He's on tiptoe. Like he's deliberately trying to make the least noise possible. And he's got this curved sword. It's called a hape. It belongs to Zeus, his father. And it fits perfectly around her neck. And as he does it, he's looking behind him. He's wearing a hat. It belongs to Hades. It belongs to Hades, so it makes him invisible. He's wearing winged shoes or sandals that belong to Hermes, so he can get away really fast. He's got a bag. I can't remember if you can see it in this image or not. It's a cabises. It's given to him by the Hisperides, the nymphs that live in the Garden of Hisperides, which is near the Atlantic Ocean. And that's also there for on loan from another deity. So he's got help from all these different gods. And he's looking behind him as he reaches out to try and kill her. And behind him is Athenae offering him advice. And it's like he can't bear to look. That's why he's turning away. And also, of course, he's afraid of her, because if she opens her eyes, he'll die. But also, he's getting this advice from a super powerful goddess. And what it looks like when you look at this vase painting is exactly what it is. We're so used to the version in Clash of the Titans where she's armed with a bow and arrow. She's super dangerous. And when we see this beautiful hydria in the Metropolitan Museum, we see what it is, which is a man with a sword beheading a sleeping woman. And it's a deliberately ambivalent artistic response. So this vase is where I stole that part of the story from. And so when I said I nicked it from these sort of snapshots, I wasn't kidding. It's really a thing. It reminds me of when you hear about hunters like shooting hibernating bears or something. Yeah, it's like, well done you. Well done, that's heroic. Another victory for team trying really hard. Yeah, and something to do with my mermaid as well. Big game hunting and killing sleeping creatures. So we're also going to go with that. And there's also, I mean, so prior to all of this, she's binding her eyes. She doesn't want to come out of the cave. She kills a scorpion by accident. She goes, oh my God, this is awful. I'm so afraid of scorpions. I had to ask someone else what they look like because I couldn't look at a picture of her. You've rewritten this story in, minutely. So you've given us this feminist and feminine awareness. You've built this family. And she's, you know, not a monster, because, you know, she's trying her best to stay away from looking at people, binding her eyes. She gets killed in a sleep. The snake tells the story. It's amazing. And so something here, not just about a feminist retelling, but about a revision of what heroism is. Yes. Totally. I mean, I hope so, because for, by the standards of his time and indeed later times, Perseus is a hero because he's the son of a God and because gods line up to help him. And there's also another way of looking at that, which I think is sort of inherent in that vase painting, which is to say, who needs help from all those different gods? Someone really weak. And that obviously is the funnier version. I mean, if you're going to write a character across the whole novel. There's always pictures of him as well. I've, again, I've done a bit, you know, online Perseus, you know, boom. And he's the sort of, you know, perfectly, you know, holding the head of the gorgon with a spear and he looks amazing and he's killed the gorgon. And you've completely upended that. I have. Completely like. Because you could be young and handsome, which he is, and muscled and strong and all of those things, and still not be heroic. And I would still argue that killing a woman asleep or indeed a gorgon asleep isn't a very heroic act. Oh, no. And in terms of her binding her eyes, this is an example of, I guess, trying to build the story out of absence rather than presence in the ancient world. There is no surviving, as far as I know, evidence of Medusa killing anyone until she's used as a weapon after her death. And I'd never seen that until I wrote her chapter in Pandora's Jar, her non-fiction chapter. I thought, like everyone else, I think, well, she's a monster, she kills people. And it's like, well, wait, who? Who does she kill? And I went through the Ovid really carefully. It's like, oh, right, no one. She kills no one. And so from there, it became really easy to say, well, this is somebody who is afflicted with this tremendous lethal power, who doesn't want it and tries her absolute hardest not to use it. And you flipped the whole thing of who's a monster, you know, is she a monster? No. No, she's not. No. She's my girl. Person, poor thing, lived in a cave. She's humanised and we see the gods as monsters here. It's just awful. It's a terrible world. And again, going back to what, you know, why do we, what is, you know, how did we ever respect, show any respect for these people? Well, you don't have to respect them. You just have to be afraid of them, right? I mean, if you're afraid of thunder and lightning and who wouldn't be, or earthquakes, Italy later, absolutely riddled with these problems, then you would just be afraid, right? You know, if you're afraid of suddenly dying of a plague, something we couldn't imagine five years ago, but now I think probably find quite easy to imagine, it's really easy to see why you might be afraid of Apollo, who suddenly fires arrows at you and that's plague. And you can see why somebody like Agamemnon might be willing, you know, to do as much as, you know, sacrifice his own child to appease a goddess, Artemis that he's offended. And so yeah, I guess I think sometimes it's harder for people, it's harder for people to unpick contemporary religious feeling from ancient religious gods because I don't think they necessarily require the same response. Sometimes you don't have to respect something to be scared of it. Yeah. But they are monstrous because they're pure ego, as you said, they're basically like toddlers with superpowers. I just think Boris is a classicist, isn't he? And so I just wonder about, you know, you're sort of saying we don't have to, but you know, our leaders do, you know, our leaders do respect or fear or... These stories are part of the bedrock of our collective unconscious, you know, and Bacchus, Apollo, Dionysus, all these, you know, people tend to self-identify as, you know, grandiose and, you know, you know, why, you know, me, you know, me, of course, Donald Trump, you know, pushing all those leaders out of the way. Somewhere along the line, I can't help but thinking that there is some kind of unconscious blueprint for behaviour that has been... Am I right or wrong? Am I... No, I mean, it's a much more tempting blueprint if you're a man, for sure, because then you basically, it's like, you know, you can do basically whatever you like because you've got the power. And I think the archetypes that surround female deities are probably a bit more complex. Nobody wants to be here because she's always jealous and punishing people. So she's become a sort of archetype of like a sort of shrewish housewife whose husband always strays. But when you look at the actual archaeology of lots of parts of ancient Greece, like Argos, for example, not the shop, don't be childish, then the temple to Hera is vast. It is vast. And you realise that for women, she may punish the nymphs and human girls and goddesses that Zeus rapes horribly, and she does. And sometimes the offspring of those encounters, like Hercules, Heracles, to give him his Greek name. But she is also the goddess who stands up for, protects and represents married women and indirectly childbirth. Her daughter is the goddess of childbirth, Elithea. And it's like, well, these temples are really big. I don't think they come just from a place of fear. There must be, impossible as it seems to us, when we read later versions of her story, there must be affection for Hera, however monstrous she is. Artemis makes a bit more sense because she sort of represents a kind of perpetual girlhood where you don't have to get married. You can kind of be free, and it's a much more kind of idyllic, rural existence that she represents. I get loads and loads of young women whose hearts I know I'm breaking by writing Athenae the way I've written her because they want her to be their sort of feminist superhero. And it's like, I hear what you're saying, but there's a moment in the humanities when she, the play by Aeschylus, where she specifically says, I don't value women, I value men. I don't have a mother, I've got a father, Zeus, because she's born fully formed from his head. So she doesn't value the role that motherhood plays at all. And it's like, wait, what? But you love women, she doesn't love women. She never once stands up for women. She's always defending male heroes like Odysseus. Yeah, yeah. So, I mean, on the subject of, well, women, and I was going to get a sex question in there somewhere. Women. I am here for your sex question. Okay, let's get the sex question out of the way as well. Is it true, do you think that generally, in these stories, non-consenting sex, i.e. rape, is basically what sex is all the time? Yes. It's just non-cons, it's rape. In myth, yes. Myth, sex equals rape. I mean, by the time you get into history, there must have been couples who are nice. Yeah. That had to happen just statistically. But yes, I mean, when you have a world with such a widespread acceptance of slavery, and yes, I always feel like I have to say this when I talk about slavery in the ancient world, there are more slaves in the world now than there were in the ancient world. There are more people. But slavery isn't a problem that's gone away and pretending that it's just in the past would be beneath us all and therefore I acknowledge and register that that's the case. But there's a widespread acceptance of slavery, which means that there's a huge and ever-present population, highly visible, of people who are basically treated like objects, in which case there is no possibility of consent, because those people have no authority over themselves as bodies, as embodied people. And so, male and female, they would have been raped with impunity, I'm afraid. And I think it's very hard to imagine that if you lived in a culture which was so accepting of something, which to us is rightly horrific, it's very hard to imagine that people in that culture would see it in any other way. Well, I was going to say so, if thinking about that, and these myths, okay, they're western, but western culture, you know, they... I mean, what effect has all of this had on us over the last 4,000 years or so? Do you think this is... Can we go, you know, there's still the same amount of slaves, there's still non-consentic sex, there's still... Do you think these myths have got into the way we think generally? It's still hard. It's still hard, these things are still... I wonder if it's the other way round. I wonder if the myths... I think I think the myths are so violent and non-consensual, because people are. I think we make gods in our image. A famous quote from Xenophanes, that if horses had hands, then their gods would look like horses. He says, but if they could draw, they would make gods in their image, just as we do. And so I tend to think the reason that these gods, and goddesses, but particularly gods, are so awful is because men with power behaved awfully. And when you have absolute tyrants and dictators, something which we're seeing a strange flirtation with again at the moment in countries which have had democracy for a long time, it becomes easier to believe, I think, if that's the world you grow up in, then Zeus would seem entirely normal. It's plausible. Sorry, that's quite depressing. Coming to my last questions. One of them was... Tony Wolff, who was the lover of Jung, and also she wrote about this female archetype the Hattara, which is a Greek, and she is self-identified as a sort of educated concubine, somebody who was out, was included in the world of men and sexually active on her own terms, and Simon de Beauvoir said the same thing, she also self-identified. And I'm wondering about this Hattara archetype, given that today women two in ten born in the year, I'm born in child free, we're educated, we have agency with subjectivity, both in life and in fiction and art, and I'm just wondering about this Hattara being an old Greek archetype, but not one we hear about more. Can you talk a little bit about who she was in the fifth century? She's not really in Greek, she's in Greek history, I'm afraid, rather more harrowingly. So it's a very specific status that you get in, for example, Athens, where citizenship is very closely guarded, so in order to be a citizen in Athens you have to have two Athenian citizen parents, but here's the thing, women can't really be citizens because they have no citizen rights, so you can only be the daughter of a citizen man, and he had better have married a daughter of a citizen man, and so on and so on. And so Hattara occupy a sort of strange liminal status, bing, right mark, extra point for your exam, but they occupy this liminal status in which they are born not in Athens, but in another part of the Greek world, so Aspasia is the most famous, the Hattara who spent lots of time with Pericles and was eventually, they eventually married although their marriage wasn't recognised under the Athenian legal system because she wasn't an Athenian woman, and then you had the chance of having a much freer life relative to Athenian wives who lived an entirely cloistered life. The more rich a family was, the more lack of freedom these women would have had. They would have lived in women's quarters, and they would have seen no male person at all other than very close relatives, brother maybe, husband yes, son yes, and that was at father, I guess, but not cousins or anything like that, unless they were accompanied by their husband. So it doesn't look like a very desirable existence. Hattara, meanwhile, might be at a lovely symposium with Socrates and Aristophanes, and Plato and Pericles hanging out, chatting, talking philosophy. It sounds like much more fun, except that we don't get any evidence at all of Athenian women running away to become Hattarae, and we do have evidence, there's a legal speech from the 4th century called the Against Naira, of a Hattara trying to pass herself off as an Athenian citizen wife. So what looks to us in the 21st, and indeed to Beauvoir, et cetera, in the 20th century, like a life of relative freedom, perhaps didn't seem so to women two and a half thousand years ago, although it's difficult for us to comprehend that, that perhaps the benefits of having your children acknowledged as citizens were so great relative to your own personal freedom was a sacrifice that you were willing to make. OK, all right. My portrait history of Hattarae. Yeah, no, I was conscious of this archetype, and I'm conscious of the 21st century giving birth to a new archetype that we rarely see in old stories, which has led me to rewrite old stories. In old stories, in ancient stories, women are either virgins to be raped, mothers, crones, witches or whores, and which is for me the reason why I want to rewrite stories is because where's me? Is the educated sort of roller-skating writer who, I don't know, I don't know, gardens, chilli peppers, does anything, where's the free woman in old stories? They don't exist. Our best case scenario is Fun Witch, which I will take at a push as archetypes go. Yeah, Fun Witch. One more question before we go to the audience. Something about healing. Are we getting a wave? Oh, we're going to do reading. Can I have a quick question? Oh, do we have time? All right, quick question. My final question was about healing. I was always led to believe that myth is a form of mental health, good mental health. Myth and mental health, myth heals us. Something about these are stories, we've told ourselves, they come from our unconscious, they come from our shadow, they come from bits and pieces of us, thrown up, thrown into stories, we can comprehend, and when we read stories, old stories, you know, red writing hood, all of it comes from... That's a new story to me. But it's something to do with healing, us. Why do we tell stories? There's no functionality apart from our mental health really. And these stories don't feel healing at all. These are all terrible stories about rape and killing and beheading. Can you say a bit more? I think myths are a mirror. They show us ourselves, and that's why myths have multiple timelines. So this story, Stone Blind, is a story based on myth which dates back, you know, the Bronze Age is when this is set. So, you know, more than 3,000 years ago. And then it's a story which is retold by, you know, very briefly, P.C. Ot, he's approximately contemporary with Homer. So let's say 7th century BCE. And then it's told again. You know, there's a lost play called The Forkid as the Daughters of Forkis. So it was told in the 5th century as a dramatic thing. We've only got two tiny fragments of it, goddammit. And then Ovid takes it on. 1st century BCE into CE. And he looks at it and gives us a different version of it. At the same time, all those artists that we thought about are painting those incredible vases sometimes with a story, sometimes less so. And then the Renaissance happens and, you know, Cellini or Canova take on. Neoclassism happens and then we have more versions of Perseus, more versions of Medusa. And then, you know, here I come along and go, okay, this is my version. And it's to show you my reading of this story has all those timelines in it too. Because I've read them all or looked at them all and they're all there, super thin so that you can still see the story through the whole thing. But of course my lens is 21st century and feminist and so this is my reading and hopefully in the future someone else will want to tell it differently again. And I think we have to show ourselves to ourselves and these stories are a way in which we do that. We say what is it that I'm unhappy about in this world or happy about in this world or who am I or who are they or how can I work out who I am in relation to them storytelling shows us ourselves and that can happen in something as extraordinary as the Iliad or as tiny as a short story by Borges or as minuscule as a couple of stanzas of poetry these modes of art show us who we are if we choose to look. I agree completely. I totally agree absolutely. And then, yeah, I mean they're healing as well to kind of ruminate again and again and again who are we, what happened what happened, do you remember when oh god can we hear it again all of that. And that's why we like hearing the same stories again. I think it's one of the reasons children like to hear the same story and they go bananas if they can change it. It's like well because there's something safe in this and you're learning how you're learning how stories work but you're also learning where you fit in this story I think. I think we're going to end there because we've got more reading and questions from the audience but for now can we have give it up for Natalie. If you still think of her as a monster I suppose it depends on what you think that word means monsters or what ugly terrifying gorgans or both of these things certainly although Medusa wasn't always can a monster be beautiful if it is still terrifying perhaps it depends on how you experience fear and judge beauty and is a monster always evil is there ever such thing as a good monster because what happens when a good person becomes a monster I feel confident saying that Medusa was a good mortal has that all disappeared now did it fall out with her hair because I think you already know why the snakes were so anxious that she cover her eyes when they heard her sister approaching but that's another question for another day I suppose do snakes have emotions are they capable of anxiety but let's just focus on the question in hand they knew before Medusa knew that her gaze was now lethal she found out a day or two later when she tried to remove the bindings from her eyes she turned her gaze on something she could see moving across the ground in front of her a quick dark streak on the golden sand and it stopped mid run she reached out and picked it up dropped it straight away when she realized she was holding a scorpion picked it up again when she understood that it was dead it took her a moment to work out what was wrong it was the wrong texture for a scorpion she had perhaps this shouldn't need saying but just in case never held a scorpion in her hands before she knew their sting could be fatal she also knew how shiny they were how slick their shells appeared and this was rougher to the touch than a scorpion should be and surely it was too heavy given its size she took it and kept it and puzzled over it but she doubted her own eyes and who could blame her after they had sustained such an insult she wondered if she hadn't seen it move if it was a tiny statue of a scorpion that had washed up on the shore or perhaps one of her sisters had found it in a human settlement nearby and brought it to show her and then forgotten to tell her about it none of these explanations seemed to her to be less plausible than the truth that she had looked at the scorpion and it had turned to stone it would take two more days two dead birds a cormorant a beater before she understood the truth one of the things that I really loved about Stone Blind is this one that I really loved about Stone Blind and also A Thousand Ships was the many narratives all woven together and I was quite interested in just the practicalities of writing it and if you know from the start which perspectives you'd want to include and which order they come in or if that's something that kind of raised through the process of writing yes some of them I do I'm still really I know it sounds really mad but I can't quite understand how you've read Stone Blind because I haven't given it to you do you know it's only been out for such a short time I'm like wait where did you find it probably in a shop aw yeah how can this be it's going to take me a few more months I think each time but yeah no I start out knowing some of them but this book particularly I thought I would write for once I thought I would write a single voice and that didn't last like two minutes and I spent weeks thinking I would and I was like no no no and I was like well maybe if I had this one voice at the beginning I'm like yeah that's not how and then really quickly I worked out that I wanted more recurring voices you know ships has more the recurring voices are Calliope and Penelope but generally the Trojan women are third person so it returns to them generally you get somebody once and then they go and this time I knew I would keep coming back to Andromeda I would keep coming back to Danai and I would keep coming back of course to Medusa and her sisters and to Athene and so there were many more pre-existing long threads that I decided on when I started and then the sort of individual voices where I was like could I do this bit you know could I just randomly go down could this be the wife of Poseidon could this be could I do this voice from someone else's perspective could I take a bird could I take a tree and I thought that would be fun as it went along but I generally I was pretty sure I'd do the olive grove and when I realised I could have the crow I was like oh you're kidding me this is going to be so much fun and it was really fun to write it was really fun to narrate when I did the audiobook so yeah some of them just turned up sort of as I went but I always know where the story is going to begin and or mostly I do I didn't with Jacasta it surprised me and I thought all the way through how am I going to tell people a story they already know and then 50 pages out from the end I was like wait I don't know no it's fine so yeah no it changes as you go it would be like colouring in it would be like if I had planned it all I would just feel like I was filling it in I mean the least convenient place to ask your question it's a three-part it's character building for them so three-part how old were you when you first encountered the ancient world how did it make you feel and how did that feeling influence your writing I don't know exactly how old I was when I first encountered the ancient world but I've said this before and again I feel bad because my mum is here but I know what I'm supposed to say is there is an extensive library of classical literature and the answer is Clash of the Titans because obviously Clash of the Titans because it came out in 1981 I don't think we went to the pictures to see it no we didn't my mum can confirm that I saw it on TV so probably a couple of years later because young people this is how it used to be it was on at the cinema and then you had to wait just wait until someone put it on telly and if they didn't like a film you liked you could never see it again that was the rules so yeah I guess I was probably about I don't know eight or nine before I remember seeing that film and I must have read like the I don't know the puffin book of Greek literature or whatever Greek myths before that but I don't remember it my brother does he says we had that and a book of Norse myths as well but I have no recollection and then I started studying classics at secondary schools so I started doing like Roman life or something at 11 Latin at 12 Greek at 14 so I was a massive nerd so I remember loving the Ray Harryhausen films because they were so intricate and although again they I know that the stop motion animation has dated to me it's still incredibly potent you know and and so that that sense of wonder that you had when those skeletal warriors rose from the ground and Jason and the Argonauts that is is ever present in my encounters with the ancient world whether it's history or myth or you know studying any part of it when archaeologists hang out with me I still feel the same it's like what how really are you sure and that sense of it must be awful to study and not feel it lots of people probably have that experience but I'm very lucky and I moved through the world in quite a wandering way mainly because most of you are baffling to me Do you speak any Greek? Modern Greek or ancient Greek? Either. Oh I can read ancient Greek in Latin so I'm fine I've just come back from Corfu yes is a job and by the time I checked into my hotel me and the man on the desk had discussed why Homer and Hesiod weren't taught properly in Greek or English schools and I hadn't even got my key before he said I'm going to have to buy you a beer so we can discuss this further and then he gave in a Greek beer is usually made by Mythos or Helios so he sat there drinking Mythos well I did he was very professional at having coffee and discussing Greek myth and I was like is that when I check into the premiere in in the Midlands or wherever I am not in the Midlands I'll be staying with my mum obviously you read ancient Greek and you can speak modern Greek I can't speak modern Greek I can read modern Greek enough because so much of it is like but yeah I'm hopeless modern Greek is completely different and Latin? You speak Latin? I can read Latin only the Pope speaks Latin and he's a terrible church Latin and there's also a radio station I should say that broadcast in Latin brilliantly and insanely so yeah I can read my way around Italy and modern Greece but I can't talk to anyone while I do it which must be nice for them I would think Hi Hi Can we have this question and then B's question because we haven't got sound on B would that be okay? Yeah I just wanted to ask what advice would you give to people who want to write fiction in the mythological slash classical slash ancient world? I mean go for it there's a huge movement for it at the moment I'm kind of thinking I've got to keep running till it runs out so don't all lose interest because I've got like three more books to write and then I might have some time off but yeah now's the time to be doing it everyone's mad for myth so yeah I think every generation rediscovers myth and Greek myth almost in particular and there are various reasons for that my feeling is that Greek myth very specifically centres people which you don't see necessarily in a myth cycle that centres on a giant tree or whatever not to diss the tree but the tree's not going to write a book in fact if anything the tree would rather you didn't write a book because then it would have a longer life probably and less papery one but yes of course you should and hurry up before everyone moves on to Norse myth or something Sorry I also do a bit of this as well and everyone loves my mermaid and they sort of think I made the story up I didn't know I didn't make it up it was a story I've you know I've developed it or it was an old they've always asked me about my mermaid story I'm like it's not mine I didn't invent that story I suppose it's an act of making it your own though but I've made it my own and they're like why did the women do that and I'm like I didn't write that bit that's the old story but also I think there's that the bone structure which is so unconscious that I think we do unconsciously understand archetypal story structure archetypal characters who's the goodie who's the baddie what should and shouldn't happen immensely gratifying it's like built in good plot isn't it? Yes absolutely so I suppose that in a way gives you a second answer which is that you have to do your homework know the story really well but who doesn't want to do that it's literally my job to dick around looking at myth Bea have you got a question for us we've got a question that's come through from our online audience it's from Anna Water and thank you Anna she asks how much evidence is there that it was Athena who cursed Medusa and not Poseidon she says I was unsure whether Medusa was cursed the way she was so she couldn't speak of the crimes that had been done to her e.g. she was turned into the crazy ex not to be believed or she was cursed because she had been raped in Athena's temple whatever the reason she was punished for the crimes of a man of course she was there's no evidence that Poseidon curses her I'm afraid at least not a version of the story that I know and I've been reading about it for ages so yeah I know I don't want her to do it either I don't want Athena to be that person either but she is so we are where we are it's a source of great stress to us I think the way that rape survivors are treated in general but in Greek myth it's certainly no better than anywhere else and we see it more than once that someone is essentially excommunicated by a god a priestess like Cassandra is raped in a temple and then the responses that she loses her priestly skill and it's like wait what sorry what and the punishment for the guy who raped her is that he profane the temple not her body and that's very hard for us to not be injured by a new you know and it hurts but yeah I wish I could tell you that just Poseidon is the only villain of this piece but I'm afraid it's not so that bit's true in the story that is not a bit that you changed that's not a bit that I changed I really like how we're talking about truth in a story that's a true bit that's a true bit of the myth any other questions so people at the back oh hello brilliant you so Salmon Rushdie once said when he moved on from a book he had to put the characters almost in a coffin in a box in a dark room so he didn't have to think about them anymore and your plots are so clever your characters are so vivid how much do you actually have kind of a ceremony okay now I'm done with you you've got to be put away and I've got to think about the next thing that sounds a little bit like radio superstar Anita Arnan to me I think it might just be I'm hopeless at putting characters away I think and I didn't realise I was as bad at it as I am until I was writing Pandora's Jar and each chapter I thought God I could write a whole novel about you and that was perfectly reasonable in the first chapter where it was about Pandora and then in the second chapter I thought aww maybe I'll do a novel about Pandora and maybe I'll do a novel about you as well it's like you've literally written a novel about Jakasta already she's in the title and then it came to Helen and I was like aww and she's in a thousand ships what is wrong with it every time I'm like come and be my friend I approach everybody like a sort of anxious Labrador puppy without ever really acknowledging that I'm done here I just think I would come back into this story in a heartbeat so at the moment I feel like my time with Medusa was sort of it felt like it was closed when I finished the first draft and then of course as you know as the author of several very successful books for example The Patient Assassin and the story of Coenor Diamond with William Dalrymple that you take these stories and you think okay well it's done now and then the edits come back and you open it up again and you're like okay let me reopen this toy box and move everyone around and you know you put it down and then you do the audio narration and you're like okay so here you are again hanging out with me and then you put it away and then you go on tour and you're like well here we are one more time hi so there's never a time when I feel vaguely like I move around the world with this sort of chorus of these women surrounding me which almost certainly explains why I'm single I think because you can see that might be an intimidating prospect for all but the most sturdy of men I don't even, I mean I do, I say I don't blame them of course I do as a group and as individuals but yeah I don't feel like I ever put them away as much as I probably should do but perhaps that's because they had such a long existence before I picked them up I wonder if that's it oh look there's a whole look at this there's 25 people with their hands up we can have one more okay somebody needs there needs to be a competent, how do we do this yes yes the lady in the glitter the glittery top I was a lack of agency as such a big theme in the ancient world I was really heartened by your spartan women podcast that you've done quite recently and I wanted to just ask in comparison to Medusa and the awful situation the awful everything that happened to her if that had happened in spartan time with spartan women would that have been different would there have been a rallying in outrage against a spartan woman being raped it's a nice thought isn't it but it doesn't happen when Helen is raped I mean there's a war declared Helen is kidnapped by theses of Minotaur fame when he is in his 50s and she is either 7 or 10 and you know it's grim when ancient authors are squeamish and rounding up to the nearest 10 and her brothers theses we sometimes call them Pollocks invade Athens which is where she's been taken to to get her back but in some versions of the story she's already had theses baby by the time she's recovered so we don't see that story there what we see is a much more traditional patriarchal story which is that men go to war over the honour as they perceive it of women's virginity so yeah I like your version better where the sort of you know a band of spartan women get to you know avenge themselves on this is a more kind of amazonian vibe maybe but yeah I like this version you should write this I would totally blurb this book my agent is sitting at the front laughing cos he knows I never blurb books so I never have time to read them he's doing a face which says yeah Nathalie like you'd say yes if I were to send you that and I'm enjoying every second of it I feel really bad about your question do you want to ask me afterwards cos you were right there it's taken from you and I've got that sort of terrible lespri de scallio in your behalf alright you've been very good about it okay you can ask me afterwards if you want alright okay on that note yeah I think this is um declared over and there is um snake bite there is actual snake bite to be drunk I kid you not and there are crowns to be had there are books to be signed as soon as I get the first signing in and there's chatting to be done amongst you all thank you all for coming very much thank you Nathalie