Hello. We here at By Jove love myths. Old Stories, legends, tales from the cultural canon – call them what you will, they are excellent. As a Classicist, I have a particular bias towards the stories of ancient Greece and Rome. While By Jove’s definition goes beyond these stories, they are some of the richest-known soil for myth-picking and probably what first comes to mind when one thinks of myth. The ancient sources for these myths are some of the better things humans have written: the Epic Cycle, the Homeric Hymns, fifth century Athenian Tragedy, Ovid’s Metamorphoses are all rightly considered masterpieces. They are phenomenally well-written and have survived for thousands of years because this has been clear to every subsequent generation which read them. We at By Jove love these works and we admire their authors. They do not own the myths, their works being only one version of the myth. Even in those instances where we only have one ancient source for a myth we are still unashamed in our habit of looking to see how we can manipulate the story to our own ends. It’s not tricky to do, either. Myths are elastic. This post is going to be a case-study in mythic elasticity. I have chosen the myth of Zeus and Semele.
Zeus (the king of the gods) and Semele (a mortal and princess of Thebes) had sex. Semele became pregnant. Her sisters did not believe her story of who the father was and demanded she prove it by getting Zeus to appear in his true divine form. Zeus’ true form is that of a lightning bolt and Semele was killed. Zeus saved the unborn child by sewing it into his thigh. (Don’t ask how that works, it just does. Zeus is a god and doesn’t have to follow silly rules like “Biology” and “Physics”). The child was eventually born and named Dionysus (which means “twice born” for any fans of name etymology). Dionysus grew up in The East, and when he matured returned to Thebes where he punished his mother’s family whom he held responsible for her death, driving her sisters into a frenzy which ends with them killing Pentheus King of Thebes, cousin of Dionysus.
That is, as near as I can make it, the bare bones of the myth. If you’re going to create your own work of art based on this myth you have lots of options available to you.
Firstly, which bit of the myth are you going to tackle? Zeus and Semele’s relationship? Semele and her sisters? Dionysus’ time in The East? His return to Thebes?
Zeus meets his son Dionysus.
You’re in good company if you chose Dionysus’ return, because that is the focus of Euripides’ Bacchae. That said, are you going to follow Euripides’ version and have Dionysus trick Pentheus into sneaking on the women’s bacchic rites dressed as a woman; or are you going to have him at the head of an army in a grand confrontation in the mountains? Then there’s the question of the Dionysian vs Apollonian raised by Nietzche and (perhaps unnecessarily) obsessed over since.
Are you interested in Dionysus’ upbringing? How does a child grow up into “Dionysus twice-born son of Zeus, Bacchus god of the vine, Liber lord of the torn veil”? You’ll need to establish your idea of what sort of god the adult Dionysus is – find the balance between his fun-loving aspect who gave humanity the great gift of wine and terrifying god who can drive people into frenzied madness. Does his godhood fall upon him all at once or over time? How does he deal with those raising him? You’ll need a good head for plot for this one because Dionysus’ childhood doesn’t get much of a mention in the ancient works, you’ll have to make it up yourself.
Perhaps it’s the relationships at the start of the myth which interest you. Is the sex consensual? If it is, who seduced whom? If Semele did the seducing is it love or a status ploy? Are you going to deal with Zeus’ emotions at vaporising someone he loved? If the sex was in fact rape then you have to explore the effect of that on Semele, and the fact the mocking by her sisters now smacks of victim-blaming. Also why did Zeus agree to appear again?
If you’re going to try to tell the whole thing then there’s the above questions, as well as those of consistency and how you’re going to stop the whole thing seeming just too damn long.
Once you have an idea of the version of the myth you’re going to tell you have all the questions common to any artistic endeavour. Are you going to turn your version into a book/play/poem/comic/what? Linear story-telling or in medias res? What’s your target audience? Are you going to put jokes in? How you tell a story is as important as the story itself.
I wrote this post mainly because in the week I had a coffee and an invigorating chat with By Jove co-Artistic Director Mr David Bullen and am currently really in the mood to think on myth. But I hope you now have a bit of an idea about how wonderfully complex and fertile stories which have been told and retold over thousands of years can be. Hopefully you can see why By Jove and others keep coming back to them and why, done properly, you can still get new and wonderful things, challenging and engaging works of art out of the same old Mediterranean campfire tales.
One hopes you’re well,
yrs,
ADWoodward
