![]() ![]() Hamilton, too, comments that being so initiated gains its subject “geographical fame,” suggesting that Europa cut a deal for a spot in the atlas. What we think about sexual violence today is unhelpful to understand the properly “cosmic event” recorded in the myth of Persephone. For example, one of the field’s leading lights once explained (and later, upon reflection, modified) that the Greek goddess Persephone’s “proper name” is “only bestowed when she has been initiated, become an adult, and lost her maiden status.” What the original claim underlines is that the myth of Persephone should not be understood through modern ideas of rape. I would join a field-the study of religion-in which explaining the local mindset of seemingly awful things is standard practice. I’d learn about the role of women in Greek and Roman antiquity how ancient Greeks and Romans perceived rape and how Athenian law adjudicated rape accusations why Greeks liked to talk about love coming through arrows how to conceive of consent in classical Athens and how to teach rape scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses in the era of trigger warnings. Much later, I’d focus my educated self on getting down and geeky on all of this. ![]() I could only see myself wanting to recreate its conditions, over and over. All of this stalking and constraint and strength of feeling made me feel a little woozy as I read in my bunk bed. A god chased you someone accidentally stabbed you you couldn’t help returning to a spot where a first tryst occurred you were visited for nighttime pleasure by someone you couldn’t see. But it was pursuit inside a cloud unknowing, a shroud of darkness. The key plot point in these stories seemed to be pursuit. I wanted to be the one who stirred that desire, that impulse to possess. “He decided that he could never rest satisfied unless he proved to himself beyond all doubt that she loved him along and would not yield to any other lover.” That’s Hamilton writing about Cephalus, but the line fits at least seven other characters. Part of the thrill was not knowing what role I wanted for myself in the story. Was it weird to wish I could turn into a forever-bubbling spring (like Arethusa) or a shining-leaved tree (like Daphne)? I liked how overpowering emotions guided every mythological action and reaction: cockeyed desires strung together risk and longing, manipulation and capture. I also drank in the Steele Savage illustrations (a 1970 reviewer in The Classical Outlook: “The illustrations are strikingly beautiful, although they bear a closer relationship to Fantasia than to anything Greek”). They concluded with limited lover visitation or a harassed gal being turned into a linden tree. In the weeks, months, and years after the slender book became mine, I read and reread the stories of love and adventure that Hamilton rendered so wryly: Cupid and Psyche, Pyramus and Thisbe, Orpheus and Eurydice, Pygmalion and Galatea. Somehow, the absent figure is the most affecting, a myth unto himself. Social scientists work to get dads more involved because research indicates that fathers’ involvement in their child’s early education is correlated not only with academic success but also with improved overall well-being. As with most US children, my mother was more involved in my educational development than my father. As with most US children who attend public schools, the majority of my instructors were female. The scene sticks with me, I think, because so many of my earliest memories involve women teaching me to read and men assigning me things to read. When I was ten, he handed me a paperback copy of Edith Hamilton’s Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942) and said, “All educated people know mythology.” I took the book and ran upstairs, where I immediately wrote my name and the date in ballpoint pen on the inside cover, as if the ink was an incantatory potion that would launch me to the ranks of the educated. He was a deeply kind person who saw in our Erskine Caldwell clan something worth salvaging from the fate otherwise predicted by demographics. Growing up, my family had a patron: an artist who gave us his used Dodge Dart when my mom’s job took her off a bus line and who sometimes handed me five-dollar bills at the end of his visits to our house. ![]()
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