Affairs of the Gods: How Could These Victims Have Been So Clueless?

There are two ways to approach questions like this:
1) The Events of the Myths Really Happened
2) The Events of the Myths Are Stories/Propaganda/Explanations/Metaphors/etc

If you've been hanging around me or my blog(s) for any length of time, you probably know that the fiction writer in me favors the first approach -- and imagining these characters and trying to discover their motivations and understand the choices they might have made is where a lot of the fun of writing about them comes from. So with this question, it's only natural that I'd start with the more literal perspective. (It's more just more interesting guys!)

The Short Answer:
I suspect that they were less clueless and more just uninformed.

The Long Answer:

The Flight of Europa by Paul Manship
photo by me!

Here's the thing. Today, if some king's daughter were kidnapped by a really pretty bull, the whole world would know about it. Or at least the part of the world that pays attention to that kind of information, anyway. (She'd also be found and returned home, probably, rather than dumped in another country to marry into their royal bloodline, but I digress.) Back in Europa's time? It was probably more of a quiet, regional event. Why should she expect the bull of being a god in disguise, intent on stealing her away, if she'd never heard of Zeus pulling that kind of stunt?* Maybe, possibly, some kind of rumor of Zeus coming down as a shower of gold to... make sweet love? to Danae** might have been making the rounds somewhere in the Peloponnese, but it is REALLY unlikely the story would have made it as far as Phoenicia, where Europa was hanging out with her maiden friends, enjoying the attentions of a particularly tame bull.

Now maybe these two examples are cheating, because both of these women were earlier victims of Zeus' proclivities, but the fact remains that there are no guarantees that any one of the  importuned women who followed would have had extensive knowledge of the god's other exploits. There's a couple of exceptions of course. Alcmene, for example, was the granddaughter of Perseus, so the story of Great-Grandmother Danae could easily have been part of family lore before her run in with Zeus and the subsequent birth of Heracles. But since Zeus took the form of Alcmene's own husband, Amphitryon, there is really no possibly way that forewarning might have helped her avoid his attentions.

It's easy for us to see all these stories laid out neatly and chronologically, with repeated themes of Zeus putting one over on some poor beautiful girl, and wonder why these people couldn't figure it out. But the truth is, those stories weren't assembled into the written word at all until centuries after the fact. If you consider that the Trojan War was basically the end of the Age of Heroes, and all the philandering that entailed, then the majority of these events would have taken place during the Greek Bronze Age -- the Mycenaean and Minoan periods. At the end of which, civilization kind of collapsed and the Greeks not-so-promptly forgot how to write for several hundred years.

Oral history is a lot more limited, regionally, though Homer provides us with evidence that even oral stories could be spread -- if the bard thought the audience would be interested. But if he didn't?

Well. It sure makes me appreciate the bounty of the internet for self-education, that's for sure.


*Europa was mother to Minos, which means she was at least one, maybe two generations before Theseus and Heracles.

**Danae was the mother of Perseus, who was himself the very FIRST of the Greek Heroes. He did not actually ride Pegasus, and the Kraken is a sea monster out of Scandinavia. Just for the record.

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Long before she ran away with Paris to Troy, Helen of Sparta was haunted by nightmares of a burning city under siege. These dreams foretold impending war—a war that only Helen has the power to avert. To do so, she must defy her family and betray her betrothed by fleeing the palace in the dead of night. In need of protection, she finds shelter and comfort in the arms of Theseus, son of Poseidon. With Theseus at her side, she believes she can escape her destiny. But at every turn, new dangers—violence, betrayal, extortion, threat of war—thwart Helen’s plans and bar her path. Still, she refuses to bend to the will of the gods.

A new take on an ancient myth, Helen of Sparta is the story of one woman determined to decide her own fate.

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NAME THAT BUTT: Stage Two, Round Two, REVEALED!

Stage Two Rules:

• I post a butt and TWO clues, you guess who that butt belongs to in the comments. If you guess right, you get 5 points. (No bonus for being first.)
  
• Comments are moderated, which means they sit in my inbox quietly until I choose to publish them, so you won't see anyone else's guesses.
  
• HOWEVER, if you CORRECTLY identify the artistic work in question, you earn a bonus 5 points. (Provided of course, that it differs from the subject's name alone and the artist is known at all)
  
• The following Friday, I reveal the subject, along with the full backside image of the sculpture in question! If at this point you can correctly identify artist/title of the piece, you can earn an additional 2.5 points, and you may guess artist/title until the next round of NAME THAT BUTT begins.
  
• I'll keep a running tally of correct answers/points, with occasional updates of who is "winning."
  
• For Olympians, Greek AND Roman names are acceptable, because half of these sculptures were probably titled with their Roman names but in my head, they immediately translate to the Greek, and that's how I remember them when I'm organizing my photos.
  
• The game will continue for as long as I have photographs of backsides to share, but a new NAME THAT BUTT may not be posted every week, depending on Things. 

And This week's Backside belongs to...

*drumroll*

ZEUS!

Yes, it was kind of maybe a trick-butt, but(t) it IS still a mythological hiney! And for more of the story regarding Europa and Zeus-the-Bull, check out this post by the Other Me!

Remember you can still get partial points for identifying the title and artist of this piece! So, go go go! 

Writerly Inspirations

[I used Grammarly to grammar check this post, because it's easier to second guess all my commas and subjunctives after someone else points them out. And seriously, I've been doing so much revision lately I am pretty sure that EVERYTHING I write is wrong.*]

It can be as simple as a song lyric, half-heard while I’m shopping, or as complex as a movie, or the study of mythology on the whole. The things that inspire me as a writer are the things that make me ask questions, or ask questions of me that start the wheels turning in the back of my mind.

What if all the gods were real? What if your big sister was a goddess of love and didn’t know it? What if Europa knew exactly what she was doing when she climbed up on the back of that bull? What *is* it like to sail across the surface of the sun? (Train’s Drops of Jupiter is seriously the most amazing song – I could listen to it on repeat for hours, and it never stops making me want to write things!) What if there were empaths? What if Ragnarok *already* came? What is it like to date someone whose entire family is one big secret society?

After I know what the question is, and I’m writing the story that goes with it, if I’m really stuck, I’ll go for a walk, or hop in the shower, or do *anything* that doesn’t require a lot of focus but puts me in a position where I don’t have anything to write on (that’s always how it is, isn’t it?).

Sometimes I’ll chat up my characters: ask Adam what he hoped to accomplish by… well, that would be telling. I’ll talk to Thor about some piece of mythology/saga/Edda/history that’s tripping me up, and see what his perspective would be. Just getting out of my own head sometimes gives me what I need to move forward.

But for me, writing isn’t just about inspiration. It isn’t about waiting for the muse to show up and tell me what comes next. For me, writing is just as much discipline as it is creativity, and I don’t believe in writer’s block. I believe in sitting down and writing – and if I’m not sure what’s happening next in one story, I work on another until I can go back to it. Day to day, when I’m hip deep in a manuscript, all I really need is a good night’s sleep to keep going. Sometimes I’m too caught up in the story even for that much, and after writing too late into the night, I wake up too early, eager and anxious to get to the next part.

Because when I’m writing, really in the zone, learning what happens next is its own inspiration.

And man, when you hit that point – when the story is telling itself as much as you’re writing it – it makes all the other frustrations disappear. It makes all the waiting and worrying and taking books apart and putting them back together again worth it. And you realize that Tolkien was right – writing really is close to divine.

*This post is being sponsored by Grammarly, which honestly is not terrible as an "extra set of eyes," and is, full disclosure, offering me an amazon gift card for my troubles. The program did try to tell me I used the wrong to/too/two when I clearly did not, which is kind of disappointing, but it was in a "this is a commonly confused word" way rather than a "this is wrong" way.  

When using it for works of fiction, it flags a lot of pronoun usage that isn't wrong (if there's more than one pronoun in the sentence, I think, mostly, or if the pronoun is modifying another noun in the sentence) and also tried to tell me that "silence of the room" should be "silence with the room" (what?). The bigger problem though, is that it has a 20 page limit, so you have to break things down into chunks for it to analyze, which is annoying. But the thing I like about the program itself is that it teaches you the grammar as it goes through your "errors" so you can decide yourself if the program is misapplying the rule or not. 

I realized the other day while proofing one of my manuscripts that a lot of what I know and how I write is kind of "by ear." I don't know WHY I think it's right, but I know it is. (As the daughter of an English teacher, I should probably be ashamed of myself, but that's how it is. I didn't learn grammar until I took Latin.) So Grammarly's little lessons inside the explanation bubbles are pretty handy for me. I'm not sure I'm going to shell out for a subscription beyond the trial period, but, I'm enjoying playing with it for the time being.