Natalie Haynes

A PDF file of this conversation is available for download.

Jan Haywood: Thank you for joining me today, Natalie. First of all, I want to say congratulations on Pandora’s Jar, which I enjoyed a great deal, though I must apologise for having spilled coffee on my copy!

Natalie Haynes: That’s all right. Books are made to be read, in my view. And my books… you know, the copy I have of each one has a really hard life. It tours the world with me so I can read it at events or whatever. So my copy is always completely bashed up. People are often really keen to show me how pristine their copy is – or they might say, “Oh I’m sorry, I dropped it in the bath”. But I don’t care. I love that you wanted to read it in the bath. This was like the bit of the day that you set aside for just you and you read my project. I don’t mind that the pages got wet and now they’re all bumpy. I think that’s delightful. I love seeing books that have lived.

JH: Oh good, because my copy has definitely lived. I was a bit annoyed nevertheless, since the cover really is so attractive.

NH: Yeah, and it’s a beautiful blue. It’s much more beautiful in life than it looks on camera, I think. I’m not quite sure why. It still looks really classy but it looks like quite a greyish blue whereas in life, as you can see, it’s a really warm quite yellowy blue. But that doesn’t carry across.

JH: Yes, I understand. I wonder if we could start this interview, then, with you saying a little bit about what Pandora’s Jar is about – what inspired you to write this book?

NH: Yes. Pandora’s Jar is a non-fiction book about women in Greek myth. And specifically it contains nine chapters based on individual women and one further chapter on Amazons, which focuses on three well-known Amazons: Hippolyte, Penthesilea and Antiope. What I wanted to do was look at the story of women in Greek myth and how their stories had changed through 2,500 years or so, often in different media. Pandora was the obvious choice for the title because she experiences such a dramatic change in status. For the Greeks she’s an agent of change, she’s the thing that shakes things up. There are two big moments where humanity evolves, I suppose, in terms of Greek myth’s origin story. In one of them we get a fire from Prometheus and in the other one women appear.

Every ancient visual representation of Pandora shows her in the act of being created. The most important thing for the ancients was that Pandora was the first woman. By far and away. You have to conclude it because she’s never shown holding any kind of receptacle at all. The famous jar is only mentioned in some versions of her story, one of the Hesiod accounts and not the other. Sometimes the jar has nice things in it. That’s in Hesiod’s Theogony. Sometimes her husband, Epimetheus, opens the jar. Sometimes she does. But all this nuance disappears when Erasmus translated the word pithos as pyxis, from jar to box. Within twenty or thirty years, in paintings she’s being shown as a sort of Eve figure, malevolently opening this box full of horrible things to ruin everything for everybody. Because, you know, the idea of a woman being responsible for the fall of man has been so stitched into European culture, thanks to the Bible, the idea of Pandora as something more interesting and complicated is just gone.

So I thought how interesting it was that this character who was much more positive in the ancient world suddenly became so negative. This encouraged me to look at stories where women had been monstered, literally in the case of Medusa, or had been deemed the worst possible, the worst wife, Clytemnestra, the worst mother, Medea. And then with Penelope she is the best, she was the perfect wife. And I thought, “Well that’s a different kind of prison, isn’t it?” So I wanted to look at these stories and say, “Well, what if the version that most people know isn’t the only version that there is?” But also isn’t the main version that there was. How do I do that, given that there is no original version of a myth? There’s just the earliest version that we know about, which is almost certainly based on endless earlier versions before it. So I thought, well, the thing to do is probably to show that multiplicity and to say, “Look, Helen wasn’t always Helen of Troy”. She starts out as Helen of Sparta, on that we’re all agreed. But sometimes she goes off to become Helen of Egypt. And sometimes she goes with Paris willingly, sometimes she doesn’t. Sometimes he kidnaps her, sometimes she wants to go, sometimes she doesn’t go at all. So that was the idea of the book.

JH: One of the things that really comes across from the book is, as you have just said, the very multiplicity of Greek myth. The fact that it is not fixed.

NH: Yes, things they can put on my tombstone will be number one, “well, there isn’t an original version of that story”, and number two, “actually that’s not in the Greek”. And that’s all my tombstone is going to say (laughter). In quotation marks, I hope. But that’s it, that’s all it’s going to say.

JH: And how do you think that somebody approaching your book might react to this?

NH: Yes, it’s kind of a strange tightrope to walk because I’m always I find myself asking people who are English graduates or did history or something like that, and saying, “Who’s the most famous person in the Trojan War?” And almost always in this country, in anywhere where English is the first language that I’ve asked this question, the answer is Helen.

JH: Interesting.

NH: If you ask the question on Cyprus, it’s Achilles, perhaps because everybody studies Homer at school. So they know the Iliad well. You know, it’s just a different focus. Whereas for us the teaching of classical civilisation in secondary schools is not as widespread, and so our ideas of things are much more kind of formless. And in a way that’s great news for me because it means I can write these stories and know that often I’ll be giving an audience the first version of it they’ll ever encounter. You haven’t really experienced the joy of storytelling in my view unless you’ve told the story of the play Oedipus Tyrannus to a classful of 16-year-olds who have never done any Greek or any classics at all. And a school somewhere where they don’t have any history of classics. Because as they find out what’s happened, you get this moment of realisation where people gasp.

And so you realise when you get to do this kind of thing that these stories have a kind of elemental pull on us. We’re like, “What happens next?” So it’s a huge privilege. I always feel this when people ask about when I started studying classics. Given how privileged I have been, I think it’s the least you can do to share it around. 

JH: Absolutely! Having worked on Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus recently, I was struck with a new-found sense of how devastatingly ambiguous the play is.

NH: It’s so difficult, isn’t it, and complicated and strange! When I wrote The Children of Jocasta, I aimed for a rationalised version of the story, devoid of the supernatural. So the Sphinx isn’t a monster, it’s a metaphor essentially for men who live in the mountains and are very dangerous. And gods have a much reduced role in my version of the story. Because I wanted to see what would happen if the story would stand up if the gods are taken out of it. The reason that I decided to do that wasn’t particularly because of my godlessness, although I suppose that’s probably vaguely related. It’s because of that incredible moment in the play where Jocasta says, “Oh you don’t need to worry about oracles. Me and Laius received this oracle, just don’t worry about it”. And you’re thinking, “What did you just say in the fifth century BC?” And a performance is being done at a religious festival. Sorry, what did you just say? It’s just incredible. These moments where it feels like one of these playwrights has just reached through time and grabbed you by the throat and gone, “Look!”

I always feel like that with all three tragedians, to be honest. I'm a massive cheerleader for Euripides, as you know from the book. But I feel just as passionately one day or another reading Aeschylus’ Oresteia or reading virtually any Sophocles. Even some of the fragments.

JH: So you mentioned Pandora’s story earlier – I wonder if you could say a little bit more about why you think it is that she’s been so misunderstood?

NH: Yeah, I wish there was a nicer answer but I think this one is just straight down the line misogyny, I’m afraid. I think there’s just a real craving to turn her into a villain. And I think the same craving has coloured the way we treat Helen. That she must be this sort of adulterous siren extraordinaire. And all those other versions of her that we see in ancient literature just fall by the wayside. That incredible moment in the fragment of Sophocles’ demand for Helen’s return where we find her scratching at her own face with writing utensils. What? How incredibly devastating that the world’s most beautiful woman is disfiguring the exact kind of source of her beauty, her incredible face, with the exact instrument which men have used to make her world-renowned for being beautiful. I mean it’s so extraordinary.

I think that does tell us a great deal about the complexity of Helen. And yet she just shifts through time into beautiful temptress. And becomes a stereotype rather than the incredibly complicated character that we see in ancient literature. And the same thing obviously happens to Pandora. Prometheus has taken fire from the gods and shared it with men specifically, and at that point Pandora is handed over to men and women become a thing. So for the Greeks, we’re literally two different races. Men are descended from Erichthonius, women are descended from Pandora. It is a really interesting origin story. There’s no real sense, I don’t think, of the subservience that you would find in the Christian origin story, where obviously Eve is made out of a body part. And a pretty minor one, let’s be honest. Ribs, very easy to manage without one rib, I would think. There’s that sense of Eve being intrinsically inferior, intrinsically within Adam, literally, and then in terms of subordination later. That’s just not there with Pandora. With Pandora she’s made by all the gods. Hephaestus sculpts her out of clay. All the gods come and contribute to her outfit, her skills and all these things before she is ‘all given to’ as Hesiod tells us, although of course her name doesn’t mean that, it means ‘all-giving’. And again this really annoys me. She’s the girl with all the gifts. Is she? Or is she the girl who gives us everything? How did we even think of her agency to give us presents? I don’t understand. There’s one point at the very least where a girl who looks a lot like Pandora is being sculpted and kind of coming out of the ground. And there she’s named Anesidora, ‘giving up from below’, which is an adjective that’s always used to describe the earth because it gives us crops from below. It’s like we would never think of describing the earth as being ‘all gifted’. We would always acknowledge, I would hope, that it’s active and it’s giving. And yet poor Pandora, even that is taken away from her. She’s just always on the wrong end of a linguistic screw up.

So I think it’s not an accident that there’s this desire to take her story and make her more villainous as time goes on. The shift from a jar to a box should be so minor. It’s just one receptacle versus another. And yet it simply isn’t. It’s really easy for us to look at jars in a museum in Greece or in Italy. And you can see they’re so narrow at the base, they’re so fat at the top, they always are covered with repair marks because they’ve broken many times. If they’re stored in a museum anywhere where there are earthquakes – i.e., all of Greece, and all of Italy – they’re often wired together so that they don’t fall when there’s an – they’re clearly – don’t put the world’s evils in there. It’s clearly fragile! And yet a box, it implies so much more malice. It takes so little time after Erasmus makes that mistranslation for people to start painting her. And, you know, she’s having to really make the effort. How did that happen? Previously, we had a version of her story where her husband opens the jar and stuff goes out into the world. Now suddenly it’s always just her. You could ask a thousand people and I don’t think anyone could tell you what Pandora’s husband’s name is.

JH: Yes, I think that’s right. Now you insinuated before that it was both a pleasure but also a kind of torture in choosing your chapters for the book.

NH: Yes.

JH: And I wondered how you came to choose the women that you include in Pandora’s Jar?

NH: I couldn’t do too many of the women from A Thousand Ships because I felt it people would say, “Oh this again.” So I really didn’t want to overdo the Troy element. But it pained me terribly not to. I felt I had to do – and I really did want to do Penelope. And Clytemnestra was always going to be irresistible to me because I do love a woman with an axe. And then I felt like I couldn’t miss out Helen. I couldn’t resist doing Euripides’ Hippolytus because it’s such an extraordinary play. And actually that chapter I was expecting, as most of the other chapters are, to be much more wide-ranging. And in the end, it’s the only chapter with no visual arts in at all. We only discovered this when we came to work out what the chapter art should be at the beginning. But it really is just a compare and contrast for the vast majority of that chapter. There’s a bit of Catullus at the beginning I think, but it’s taking that story and looking at how Euripides does it with the gods and then how Racine does it without. And playing with those two versions of what’s ostensibly at least in part some of the same story. But I’d have been perfectly happy doing Ariadne instead. And I still feel terrible guilt for Deianira because there’s aren’t any women from the Heracles myth cycle at all. 

JH: I don’t think you need to feel guilt, but that would be interesting because Deianira’s probably not as well-known, is she?

NH: No. I think not. I mean, I will probably do a second volume of Pandora at some point. And I was assuming I would just continue doing other interesting women. And I thought, “Oh maybe I’ll just do goddesses and that would be really good fun”. But then Deianira still doesn’t get her go, so I would find a way. I would find a way to get Deianira a bit of stage time. She’s had too long in the dark. 

JH: Absolutely. So one character I want to speak a bit more about is Medea, who you focus on in one of the chapters of Pandora’s Jar. I think your reading is really successful in bringing out the ambiguity of that character in Euripides’ play. Why do you think she fares so badly when this play is performed in Athens? And do you have any thoughts about why it is the case that the play was not popular initially, but has since endured the test of time?

NH: I’ve made this argument on stage and I always get a laugh, but I’m never really joking. I think it was such a shocking revision of the story. I think the audience came along fully expecting to see (a) a woman accidentally killing her children because she’s been tricked by Hera and she kills them to give them eternal life, puts them in the Temple of Hera expecting that to happen, or (b) to see these children killed by the Corinthians. Both these versions of Medea’s story seem to exist before Euripides takes it on. And then, it’s like Euripides takes the story, spins it, puts it on its head, hammers it into the ground, sculpts it into something extraordinary and then goes, “What? Why is everyone cross?” And you go, “Well, yes, I suppose that’s one good question”. 

But I think people must have just been so shocked by his Medea; it’s such a shocking role. And those two monologues, the opening monologue and the central one, where she contemplates killing her children, are as good pieces of writing as anyone has ever done in any language. I will die on this hill and I won’t even feel bad about it.  I just think they’re both miraculous speeches. But almost equally kind of extraordinary is this sense all the way through the play that we, the audience, know who she really is, and yet no character in the play is every shown that. It’s just us. The intimacy that it creates is remarkable. I love Greek tragedy more than most people, but it’s not very often an intimate form. And yet this woman who shows a different facet of herself to every single person that she interacts with, so we know that she is putting on a persona, literally and metaphorically, when she speaks to the Chorus, when she speaks to Creon, when she speaks to Jason, when she speaks to the Nurse, even. We know – and yet we feel like we know the real woman behind all of that. And that is just the most remarkable feat of characterisation. I guess I can see that for an audience expecting at the very least a woman to kill her children by accident, which there’s reasonable kind of form for in Greek tragedy…. So the Chorus mention Ino, who was rendered mad, because that’s the only other example that they can think of. I always say on stage it must have been like the audience seeing Hitchcock’s Psycho for the first time. That people were so shocked they kind of stalked out of the cinema and within minutes they needed to see it again. And indeed Edith Hall has pointed out that within about a year, Medea was the most performed play in Greece. And really quickly it was being re-performed a lot. And it has an absolutely extraordinary power. 

I’ve been reading this play over and over again in Greek and in English, but when I came to write about it for Pandora, I noticed how many times Medea uses Creon’s name when they have their dialogue. She says his name over and over again. I wondered at first if it is a scansion. And then I suddenly realised it’s like a hostage negotiator. She’s doing it because by using his name she’s humanising herself. And I thought, “Oh my God, how many films have I seen where the negotiator has to keep using the name of the kidnapper in order to try and make this connection between them where none exists?” That’s exactly what’s happening here. This is how she’s getting him off guard. She doesn’t do it to anybody else. She uses Jason’s name obviously with cheery abandon when she’s hurling insults at him. But this constant repetition, “Oh hey, Creon, I’m just blah, blah, blah…the thing is, Creon…” over and over again. How has that been hiding from me in plain sight for all this time? I just wasn’t reading carefully enough.

JH: Yes, I see that. So there’s an element of her very subtly undermining him in a way that he’s not clever enough to appreciate? 

NH: Yes, it’s glorious, isn’t it? The amount of stupidity that he brings into their conversation. And that final bit where he goes, “All right, you can wait a day. It’s not like you can do any harm in that time”. It’s properly like a hypnotist or something. She’s basically waving a watch in front of his eyes and saying, “Follow the light, look into my eyes”. And by the time she’s finished, he’s forgotten that he’s afraid of her in quite the way he should be. It is an incredible scene.

JH: Absolutely. Another incredible scene in a different sense of the word incredible maybe is at the end, when Medea departs with the cadavers of her children on a divine chariot. What do you think a modern audience would make of an ending like that?

NH: Well they almost never see it, do they? I think what happens is that virtually every single production I’ve seen of this play, not quite every, but the vast majority make the erroneous choice to remove the scene in which Medea flees uninjured. And there’s this whole mad thing with the chariot which to people who know Greek tragedy, of course, means that she has literally ascended to an immortal realm at this point. You know, she hasn’t become a goddess, but she is being treated theatrically as a goddess.

So to suggest that there’s any kind of disapproval from the gods for what she’s done is properly countering what’s on the page. And I think in many ways, changing the ending reduces the power of the end of the play for me because she shouldn’t be mad. You know? We should see a woman who she makes a rational decision to kill her children (which of course might horrify us). When Medea says, “My anger’s overwhelming”, it’s true but she knows that. She’s being completely rational about it. So to then go, “Oh well she’s just crazy,” seems to me exactly what always happens to women in narratives who don’t fit into neat boxes. “Oh well she must be mad”. I think it kind of cheats the play, really. There is something absolutely extraordinary about this woman who is prepared to do such harm to children she clearly loves and yet she’s going to walk away from it with her head held high. She’s going to fall apart, but she’s going to fall apart after the confines of the time of the play. And that to me is much more powerful. But, you know, I have never directed it so the choice is not mine to make.

JH: Interesting – so if you did direct the play you would definitely have a divine chariot?

NH: I absolutely would!

JH: I also wondered if we could talk about the Amazons because, as you said, there are nine chapters focused on a specific woman from myth, and then you have this other chapter where you have a group of women and it’s true that you do focus on particular Amazonians as part of the chapter. But there’s also quite a bit of discussion about this group of women. What lies behind your decision to focus on the Amazons particularly?

NH: I feel vague guilt with the Amazons because I always think other people won’t be as interested as they are. I know that I love Amazons. But I always vaguely assumed, when I wrote the Penthesilea chapter in Ships, I was certain it would be the first to go. That’s not entirely true, I thought it was the second to go. I thought Laodamia would get edited out. And I thought Penthesilea would get edited out. Essentially, I thought my publishers would say, “Look, there are just too many voices and it’s too confusing”. And both of those chapters were consistently someone’s favourite in the whole editorial process. So it just goes to show I am a terrible guesser!

So yes, as I was embarking on the chapter, I assumed that I would write it about Hippolyte. But I ended distracting myself and expanding the scope of the chapter. Funnily enough, when I read it for the audiobook, I felt that I could cut 500 words from the chapter, and yet many people keep telling me it’s their favourite chapter; goddammit. I tried really hard to make this better. I was certain I’d failed. But thank you very much. I think the Amazons have this incredible pull on modern readers, which they absolutely deserve and warrant. And it really annoys me that they don’t get their go, because again they were massively popular in the ancient world. You can’t move for wine cups and bowls with Amazons painted on them. And they just get lost. And my anger when I wrote the Penthesilea chapter in Ships was entirely provoked by that absolutely rancid Robert Graves poem. And I thought, “How did this woman, who is so heroic in Quintus Smyrnaeus, exactly like Patroclus, Hector, Achilles, become so forgotten?” That’s unacceptable to me.

JH: Absolutely, and hence the Amazons muscled their way into your book. I wonder if we would turn to discuss your last book A Thousand Ships, a work that gives us different stories, all from a female perspective, concerning the events of the Trojan War. I was particularly struck by the different timepoints in the book.

NH: The structure of this book – I’m obsessed with this – is basically one long bar, that’s the Troades narrative, and then the causation timeline runs backwards in a spiral that then fireworks out, and then the consequences timeline runs forward as well, and fireworks out. And that is the shape of that book as I wrote it. 

JH: Interesting – I certainly had not appreciated this fully. Could you say a bit about what inspired you to write A Thousand Ships?

NH: Yes. I came to writing Ships having written The Children of Jocasta, which I wrote outside of contract (an extremely perilous thing to do). I wrote Jocasta because I wanted to retell a Greek tragedy from the perspectives of its women. I knew that the Oedipus story could hold up to a lot. I’d seen versions on stage where he doesn’t even kill his dad at the crossroads. And it still works. And I thought, “Well, Sophocles can cope with me”. He’s stood firm for 2,500 years, he can cope with me throwing rocks at him. And anyway, they’re not rocks, they’re sort of lovely feathers in rock shapes.

Before that, I’d written a contemporary novel, The Amber Fury, which took some structural elements, formal elements I suppose, from the Oresteia, although people don’t notice it because the book is set in modern-day Edinburgh and a bit in London. Returning to A Thousand Ships, I was walking home from town and I thought that I wanted to cover the story of the Trojan War, which even more so than The Children of Jocasta and The Amber Fury, incorporated lots of women’s voices. So when I got home a Google search suggested that nobody had yet done this, and so I wrote a page summary of what I intended to do and sent it to Pan Macmillian, who bought The Children of Jocasta and wanted a second book. Luckily, they were happy with the proposal.

I was dizzy with excitement at the beginning of Ships, in a way that I’m not normally. I think that is probably reflected in the book. And I knew it would begin with the Trojan horse. I always knew it would begin with the end of the war, partly because I thought that’s the bit everyone knows. So I decided to start with the thing everybody can get a proper grip on. And from there I say to the reader, “Now look over here before this happened. And now look over there before it.” So it was quite a complicated book to write. But I’ve zero regrets for how difficult it was to do.

JH: And so you shouldn’t – it’s a great book, I loved it. I particularly enjoyed Penelope’s letters, which are interspersed throughout the book.

NH: Thank you. This is another example of muscling in because I fully intended with Ships to retell the basic story of the Iliad and the Odyssey but from the perspective of the women of both works. And actually, what happens, as I’m sure you noticed, is that Briseis and Chryseis have quite a long chapter but pretty well the entire action of the Iliad is covered in about a page and a half. The thing that’s important to these two women is that they’ve been away from the people they love for ten years.                                      

And then with the Odyssey, I was certain that I would tell the story of the Odyssey from its women’s perspectives. I was fully expecting to include Circe, for instance, but obviously I didn’t because Madeline Miller’s brilliant book came out after I’d written Ships but before it was published. So I was expecting to do a chapter for Circe, for Calypso, for Penelope, for Eurycleia, for Anticlea, and one for Scylla and Charybdis. I never worked out how I would write Charybdis; obviously just as a glugging sound. And I was absolutely set to do it. But then I wrote the first Penelope letter, and I thought that there’s no way I’m changing this voice. So the whole Odyssey ends up being told by Penelope because I liked her too much.

JH: I can see why. Were there any challenges in writing those letters in the voice of Penelope?

NH: No, they were an absolute joy. Penelope’s letters were the easiest bit of the book to write apart from the goddess chapters, which were really good fun to write because they’re so funny. The goddesses have a slightly more contemporary way of speaking because they live forever so they’re still around now, right? So the voice was fun to do to. For example, the chapter on Eris I absolutely adored writing because she’s so malevolent and so thick. I never write a character like that. I loved her.

JH: Was there anything in particular that inspired the Penelope letters?

NH: Ovid, of course. I absolutely love the Heroides. The Laodamia chapter obviously comes straight out of Ovid, although she’s not told in the first person. But, yes, I spent the whole of lockdown this year doing a film each week about Ovid’s Heroides for a set of videos called Ovid not COVID. That’s how much I like the Heroides – when you lock me in my flat, all I do is sit here and read the Heroides. So let that be a lesson to everybody.

It was just a delight to write Penelope because she’s just getting very slightly crosser with every letter that comes. So they start out like “my darling husband…” because the war’s just finished and he’s on his way home and she’s so excited. And then, of course, it takes longer and longer and she just gets grumpier and grumpier. So the letters start to seem less loving and devoted and just become a bit more grumpy. And then, by the last letter, she doesn’t write a letter to Odysseus, but instead a prayer to Athene. It’s a clear shift in tone where she goes from being and angry wife to a kind of supplicant figure.

It kills me how many people he reveals himself to back in Ithaca before he tells Penelope. It’s so mean. She’s waited twenty years. Meanwhile, he’s been all over the place. And let’s remind ourselves that Odysseus’ big adventure narrative includes one year spent in one lady’s house [Circe], and seven years spent in another lady’s cave [Calypso]. So don’t be all, “Oh I’m such an adventurer, I’ve had such a difficult time”. You’ve spent eight of the past ten years dallying elsewhere.

JH: Yes, it really can be a struggle to empathise with Odysseus.

NH: Yes, I always tell audiences that the most dangerous place in Greek myth for a man is anywhere near Odysseus. The most dangerous place for a woman would be anywhere near Theseus. And I really stand by that advice. If you’re going to wish yourself back in time and into myth, women, avoid the guy who kills Minotaurs. He’s an absolutely toxic bachelor. Men, avoid the man who goes round telling the god of the sea that he’s just blinded his son. What is wrong with him? Stop talking the whole time.

JH: Indeed, so perhaps Odysseus is not quite as smart as he thinks he is.

NH: He’s almost, almost as smart. And he’s definitely the smartest guy in the room. He’s just not as smart as Penelope. And so that was a real treat that her first letter to him is where she gets to…not quite remonstrate, but not far off. But to talk about the way he nearly manages to avoid going to the Trojan War. It’s one of those great moments where it shows us how tricksy Odysseus is. He pretends to be mad but then at the last minute they threaten the safety of his child, put his baby in front of him, and the truth is revealed. Penelope would know that straightaway, that kind of intimate physical bond with her child. Whereas it doesn’t occur to him, and I thought that right there is the difference between them.

JH: Now you, along with a lot of other writers, have been exploring Greek myths afresh. And what I mean by that is resuscitating or bringing out new voices, a lot of those from women. And interestingly enough, many of these are also works by women writers. So for example we’ve got Alice Oswald and her poems, like Memorial, which I think is a really stunning poem.

NH: Yes. In fact I saw her perform – I was going to say read it, but she doesn’t read, she memorises it. She performed a bit of Nobody at an Odyssey day at Cheltenham Festival in 2019. Emily Wilson was there too. But yes, she performed a bit of it, and it was incredible.

JH: I can imagine. And then there are others, such as Madeline Miller, who wrote Circe, and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire. What do you make of this proliferation of work?

NH: It’s a good time, isn’t it? A good time for the Greeks. I guess I can only really answer from my own experience, but I think there’s a real sense amongst those have haven’t had the chance to study classics at school that they’ve missed out. And since I published The Ancient Guide to Modern Life in 2010, many people have contacted me to say that they were in some way found wanting at school. In many cases, they didn’t pass the 11+ in the UK, so they couldn’t go to the grammar school to study Latin. Or they were put in the wrong stream so they weren’t allowed to study Latin. Or their school didn’t do it. Somehow they were made to feel at a crucial age that they weren’t good enough for the ancient world.

And I think I am at least always trying to convey to people that you don’t need an entrance exam to study classics. Classics is right here – it belongs to all of us as our collective past. It’s unacceptable to convince children that they’re not good enough for Latin. Latin isn’t even difficult. Greek, I admit, is difficult. Latin isn’t difficult. So if you managed to convince children that they are not good enough to study Latin, then take a long hard look at yourself, teachers of the past, because they could do it. So I think there is this sense that these stories have been entirely unreasonably withheld. I think that’s probably a big part of it.

The extra good news, of course, in terms of getting to write books and finding readers now, is that for a very long time classics had a set of guardians who were similar in outlook. So from the 1800s, classics was really the preserve of posh old white men. Now, some of those posh old white men were legendary scholars and completely brilliant and we’d be lost without them. But it does still mean that often women’s voices were side-lined. So the fantastic news for people like me is that these stories are still there waiting to be told to an audience who don’t have a degree in classics to have found them already.

JH: And it’s clear that audiences want to know these stories.

NH: Yes, they really seem to. And I think there’s a real sense amongst young women in particular that women’s voices have been side-lined historically and they’re sick of it. They’re right. Women’s voices have been side-lined. It is annoying. And they do deserve better. I suppose I had to grow up in a world where these texts didn’t really exist and that was boring and depressing. But I love the fact that girls don’t have to now because there are so many retellings and reimaginings and interrogations of these texts, not to mention translations like Emily Wilson’s Odyssey. So it’s an incredible time to be interested in Greek myth.

JH: It is. Now, Jocasta is a character who you mentioned already. She’s a figure from Greek myth you’ve explored quite a lot, both in Pandora’s Jar and of course in The Children of Jocasta. What do you think is so compelling about Jocasta?

NH: So here’s the thing. All the way through Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannus we are told that Oedipus is the smartest guy in the room. And he definitely is. He’s incredibly clever. And, as I have said to audiences time and again, we have lived through a time of stupid leaders. So we know how valuable it is to have an incredibly clever leader. 

You know this incredible moment at the start of the play… if you’re looking for a better illustration of the Aristotelian principles of how every scene should advance the plot and reveal character, it is peerless. Structurally, the play is perfect. The play begins and the Chorus are saying, “Everything’s terrible, we’ve got the plague, we need to sort that out, we’re going to ask Oedipus the king to sort that out. He needs to send somebody to Delphi and find out what we’ve done wrong and then we can fix it and then everything will be fine. Great, that’s what we’re going to do. Hey, Oedipus, could you do this?” And he goes, “I’ve already done it, I’ve sent my brother-in-law, he should be back in a minute”.

Everything about this scene is extraordinary because they’re here sticking to the rules of unity of time, unity of place. All the action’s going to be able to take place in a single day because Oedipus already sent his brother-in-law. So we don’t have to go to Delphi because we already sent him to Delphi. But when you actually look, which of course you do when you write a novel (but you maybe don’t when you watch the play) how physically far it is between Thebes and Delphi, you realise this is days of time that he must have been ahead of them. And that’s what I love, the fact that Oedipus is literally days cleverer than people who have plague.

We have totally watched this year in a way that I happily didn’t predict with Jocasta, we’ve watched what it’s like to have leaders who feel very much like they’re behind us in terms of how we should respond. You know, I’m sure we all remember that sort of terrifying apocalyptic vibe in March [2020] where it really felt like people were going, “Well we need to stay at home”, and yet we were still being encouraged to go out to work and to do stuff. By the time lockdown came in, it was no surprise, I don’t think to almost anyone, that a number of lives could have been saved had we only locked down a week earlier or ten days earlier. We know exactly what it’s like to watch our leaders be behind us.

And there’s Oedipus right at the front going straight for it. He’s ahead of us, and then all the way through the play we’re told that he’s clever, and we can see that he really is clever. And then when the revelation finally comes that he and Jocasta are not just husband and wife but mother and son, Jocasta realises it before he does. And she goes into the palace and we can’t follow her in. By the time he realises their relationship is dual, he’s told that she’s hanged herself and he runs into the palace and that’s where we get the famous auto-enucleation scene. So it has always vaguely bothered me that you spend so much of the play being told how clever Oedipus is. Jocasta’s the smart one. Who works it out first? She does. And she has way less information than him to begin with. Because she’s never heard this story about him having this destiny predicted by the oracle that he’s going to kill his father and marry his mother. It’s all new to her. She doesn’t believe the oracle. Oedipus, meanwhile, has known this stuff for ages.

So Jocasta is the smartest woman in the room. And she gets 120 lines in that play and that’s why we don’t notice it because she just doesn’t get very much. Oedipus really is such an extraordinary character. And it’s such an incredibly tightly structured play. All the focus is on him. He sucks light and heat from every other aspect of the story. So we just don’t notice her. You look at, for example, Euripides’ Phoenician Women where we see a very different version of the story has played out before the beginning of this play, where Oedipus has been deemed shameful and so he’s been locked up in the palace by his sons, but Jocasta is a queen mother kind of character. She’s got a sort of diplomatic status. So you realise that the story doesn’t have to be like that presented by Sophocles. The Sophocles play is extraordinary and it’s not an accident or something to be sad that it’s just pulverised every other version of the story in its wake. It is just an incredible feat of dramatic genius.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. And so I guess I was drawn to Jocasta because I thought even in the Sophocles version she is the smartest person in the room and no one ever mentions it, and so I decided that I would.

JH: Absolutely! And of course an important aspect of this story, as you’ve already outlined, is the plague. So I wondered if you had been thinking back to this book in the light of the year that we’ve been living through.

NH: Yes. It was hard not to at the beginning. Of course, because I live in London and COVID came through here very early, and enormously; everyone I know who had COVID had it in March or April. I don’t know anyone who’s had it since. It came through this city like wildfire. (I’m not pretending for five seconds that people haven’t had it since you understand. It’s just that within my social circle everyone had it much earlier.)

But that sense of living in a city and not knowing if you're safe, of not knowing how things are going to play out, I can honestly tell you that in March I ardently wished I hadn’t written it [The Children of Jocasta] because I was so worried about people that I cared about who were ill (in two cases who were extremely ill, and in one case who was hospitalised for a week). And it was something that I wished in retrospect I hadn’t spent any time imagining. 

But I think Jocasta seems to have been quite a consolation for people at that point although nowhere near as much a consolation as the radio show [Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics], which people binge listened throughout that first lockdown, as far as I can tell. So I’m delighted that it was company for so many people. Many people mailed me to say so, which was really sweet, and much appreciated. 

But, yes, I stole all the symptoms of the plague except that I gave the characters a fever rather than a cold. There’s an incredible sense of liminality. If you’re on the wrong side of the city walls, the wrong side of the palace gates, if you’re on the wrong side of the courtyard doors at any given time in that book, it will cost you your life. So it is an extremely liminal book.

JH: We’ve talked about some of the different books that you’ve written, but we have not yet discussed your radio programme, Natalie Haynes Stands up for the Classics, which you just referred to. That is obviously another thing that you’re particularly known for and, as you say, this year many people have been revisiting earlier podcasts. What inspired you to begin this series, which is something you’ve been doing since 2013? (Is that right?)

NH: Yes, I think that’s right, 13 or 14. Well, it took years of me saying, “Let me do this thing”. I was already doing like a live version of Stand Up for the Classics which started when the Ancient Guide was published in 2010 (my non-fiction book about the ancient world and the modern world, which has ten chapters on subjects like law, religion, philosophy, politics). And I would let audiences choose material because I come from a stand-up background. I had this ability to turn up at, say, a book festival and be able to perform for an hour in a way which would be funny enough – not as funny as actual stand-up, but funny enough – and the audience wouldn’t be expecting a laugh every four seconds the way they do in a comedy club on a Friday night. It was just incredibly good fun. So I’d been doing it on and off for the hardback and then for the paperback release of Ancient Guide. And I’d been pitching a version of that to the BBC for years. And then a completely brilliant commissioner, Tony Philips, had a meeting with me and agreed to a format that I wanted to do. So I was just really lucky that he was visionary about classics and putting it on Radio 4 in that way. There was a real sense, I think, that if you were talking about something serious like classics, you had to talk about it in a serious way. I completely get that point of view, I just don’t agree with it because it’s obviously wrong.

But they were very quick to see that you could talk about something with frivolity but without being ‘unserious’ about it. So I do as much work for these shows as anything else; there must be 500 sheets of pages of notes for those twenty-four programmes. The Iliad episode is the only one I’ve ever been able to rehearse. It’s an incredible amount of work.

JH: And do you have any favourite episodes? 

NH: The Iliad episode. I always knew it would be my favourite one. And it was an extra effort to do it because generally after I’d done the radio show I would kind of pilfer the material for the live shows and occasionally it would go the other way. There’d be a bit of a material that I could run the other way. So I would have talked about, for example, the death of Agrippina or something on stage when I was talking about Roman politics. And I’d pilfer that material when she got her own programme. Or I’d talk about the role of women in fifth-century Athens, which I would use for the episode on Aspasia and so on. But there were some people, such as Phryne, that I had to learn about pretty much from scratch. Women are the hardest ones of every series without exception because there’s so little evidence; the research takes so long. Do you know the Sappho episode?

JH: Yes, that just so happens to be my favourite.

NH: Thanks! It was so hard to write. I’m just so glad you like it. But, yes, the Iliad I’d practised perhaps fifty times before we recorded it. And I’d said to my – my producer is the most trusting woman alive because there’s no script – “I’m going to do all twenty-four books; what can the time be?” and she mouthed back going, “Are you absolutely sure you want to?” But I absolutely did. So she said that I had between 27:15 and 27:45 minutes. Okay. Now I’ve been doing the Iliad on stage, so I knew I could get it anywhere between about 22 and about 30 minutes. And in the week of touring before, I think I did seven shows in four days the week before I did that recording. So I’d done it a bunch of times, I’d extended it and extended it and I especially had extended the later books because I knew as I was going through it with a live audience, when I couldn’t stop, I would need to know that I’d got backup material for those later books. So I had my iPad ticking up in front of me (ticking down would have been too stressful).

So when I began the show I just pressed start and I watched the stopwatch the entire time. And I had one page of notes. It took ages to get the Iliad down to one page with two words for each book. I performed it so often in order to learn it. But I knew that if I could pull it off it would be absolutely incredible for the audience in the room. I’m a terrible radio broadcaster in this way because I’m always prioritising the audience in the room and I know it’s the wrong thing to do. But I knew that their energy will make it incredible.

Anyway, I brought it in at exactly 27:45. I was so desperate to make it. It was one of the most physically difficult things I’ve ever done. And I’m including half marathons, kickboxing gradings…it was physically exhausting. When we finished that recording, we adjourned to the pub. I don’t very often drink but I did that night. I think the next day I was at home, then the next day I was back out on tour for a couple of days. I got home on the Saturday night late and by the Sunday I was nauseous every two hours through the day. All the stress that had built up just hit me.

JH: Because it was such a demanding task to complete this special episode. I hope that recording for other episodes isn’t quite so torturous as it was for the Iliad.

NH: No, it’s not. But it takes longer. You know, I mean the Iliad was already written for the live shows. Sappho, which I’m very glad you like because I like her too, took ages. It just took ages to work out how you tell people about the poet that we know nothing about?

JH: And so much we think we know that actually is just not her biography.

NH: Exactly, in terms of facts, there’s basically none. And so I had to make a virtue of that. And in a way I kind of got to do it again differently with the women from Roman Britain episode in Series Five where it was going to be all about that beautiful letter from Vindolanda, which is the earliest example of women’s handwriting in the UK. But the more time I spent looking at it, the more I didn’t really want to talk about in isolation. And so that ended up exactly like the Amazons. I started out with a purist position, but ultimately I included a big gang of girls.

JH: To finish, could you say a bit more about what you're going to do next?

NH: There will be two novels. The first is about Medusa and the second Medea. So that’s what’s coming. 

JH: Well, I shall certainly look forward to that. Thank you for so much, Natalie, for taking time out of your busy schedule to talk with me today!