A new spin on Homer

Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood head a list of authors giving the Greek myths a modern makeover. This trend is nothing new, says Mary Beard
Homer Photograph: Getty

Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore

by Bettany Hughes

496pp, Jonathan Cape, £20

Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles

by Jeanette Winterson

208pp, Canongate, £12

The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus

by Margaret Atwood

208pp, Canongate, £12

Songs on Bronze: The Greek Myths Retold

by Nigel Spivey

304pp, Faber, £16.99

In the course of his zany argument that Homer's Odyssey was written by a woman, Samuel Butler - Victorian satirist and author of The Way of All Flesh, as well as numerous tracts on "Homeric Questions" - has some sharp words on the conduct of Odysseus' wife Penelope. Just how faithful was this mythic paragon of fidelity, who supposedly waited for her husband's return over 20 years without ever giving in to any of the suitors who had occupied her palace, bombarding her with offers of marriage?

Butler finds cause for suspicion in Homer's text itself. Why, after all, did the good wife Penelope pass letters (as Homer tells it) to her suitors? "Sending pretty little messages to her admirers was not exactly the way to get rid of them. Did she ever try snubbing? All she had to do was bolt the door." And as for that clever ruse with the weaving (she announced she would make no decision on marriage until she had finished weaving a shroud for her father-in-law - but secretly unravelled her day's work each night) ...? To Butler this seemed more like a wheeze for prolonging the games of seduction, rather than putting a stop to them. He was not the first to have doubts about Penelope. Greeks and Romans, too, sometimes found the tale of 20 years' fidelity in the face of massive temptation hard to take. Stories circulated that she had, in fact, jumped into bed with one of the suitors and was sent packing by Odysseus when he returned. Even more baroque versions imagined that she slept with every single one of her 100 or so admirers and that the result of all this strenuous coupling was the libidinous creature Pan.

Modern writers have continued this process of reinvention, whether praising her chastity (the usual theme until the 19th century), questioning her morals or, more recently, wondering about the kind of "virtue" open to an abandoned housewife. Dorothy Parker penned some characteristically sharp verses contrasting the laddish exploits of Odysseus around "the silver seas" with the unremittingly tedious domesticity imposed on Penelope back in Ithaca - and wondering why only the male achievements ever get called "brave".

No less intense debate surrounds Penelope's mythic antitype Helen, whose elopement with Paris, while her husband Menelaus was off at a family funeral, sparked the Trojan war. "Did she jump or was she pushed?" has been a key question from the sixth century BC to our own. In Helen of Troy Bettany Hughes has gathered together a startling array of answers, both ancient and modern (an investigative achievement that more than makes up for the fact that the book's main thesis - that Helen was a historical character who really existed in the late Bronze Age - is about as zany as Butler's).

Some uncomfortably violent images from the Italian Renaissance picture a decidedly unwilling Helen being dragged away by her hair. Ancient accounts, though, more often cast her as the seductress, captivating the hapless Paris under the spell of Aphrodite. One odd Latin version hedges its bets by having her explicitly ask Paris to abduct her - which, contrived as it is, is a more plausible compromise than the extraordinary line taken by the early Greek poet Stesichorus, that only a phantom of Helen went to Troy; the real woman sat out the war, innocently, in Egypt.

Often the most interesting modern accounts of Helen are those that picture the sequel of her Trojan story. When, war over, she was finally marched back home by Menelaus, then what? What on earth was life like for the couple forcibly reunited by the bloodiest conflict the world had then seen? Gladstone - with all the moral certainty of one who spent his spare time rescuing "fallen women" - was confident she would carry it off "with unconstrained and perfect dignity" and that her relations with Menelaus would bear "no mark of the woeful interval, except that its traces would indelibly remain in her own penitential shame". For once, Rupert Brooke was more realistic. In his poem "Menelaus and Helen", he pictured a nagging and garrulous old man boring everyone with his Trojan stories, a discontented wife "haggard with virtue" and child-bearing, and the shadow of Paris constantly hovering over their scarcely patched-up marriage.

There is, in fact, hardly a modern poet, playwright or novelist who has not engaged with, or meddled in, Greek myth - whether in the form of translations, adaptations or subversions, by writing sequels and prequels to the canonical tales, or presenting the stories from a different angle (often recently, as in Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife, from the point of view of the neglected women in the tale, Mrs Icarus, Mrs Midas and so on). In this sense, Canongate's new series, The Myths, which has commissioned "some of the world's finest writers" to rework a myth of their choice, is not quite so innovative as its publicity implies. Most of the writers had been (re)working along these lines already. That said, the two volumes that launch the series, by Jeanette Winterson and Margaret Atwood (alongside A Short History of Myth by Karen Armstrong, to set the theoretical scene), make an impressive opening.

Winterson's story, Weight, is a "cover version" of the myth of Atlas and Heracles. The Titan Atlas, whose punishment it is to carry the world, literally, on his shoulders, is enlisted by the super-hero Heracles to help retrieve some golden apples, guarded by a dreadful serpent, from the Gardens of the Hesperides. To free Atlas for the task, Heracles must temporarily take over the burden of supporting the world - but the question is: will Atlas return to take the world back again, or will Heracles be left with it on his shoulders for ever?

Heracles is a slippery figure in ancient myth; he is portrayed both as a drunken thug and noble saviour of humanity from barbarism; as a beefcake hero and an overweight strongman past his prime. Winterson negotiates her way through this by concentrating on ideas of masculinity, about what choices men must make on their way to becoming heroes and the simultaneously clubbable and treacherous nature of male friendship.

Some of this is extremely funny, in particular the moment when Heracles ("no brains but plenty of cunning") tricks Atlas to take the world back, with some wheedling complaints about how Switzerland - more precisely "the bloody Matterhorn" - is sticking in his back. And Winterson's deadpan account of a hero's "typical day" is chilling in its casualness and domestic asides: take the wife breakfast in bed, gather an army, lay waste a city, then slit the throats of the enemy. But too much of the book is written in that slightly mystical, stream-of-consciousness, verbless-sentence style that writers often fall for when they have great cultural universals and the well-springs of western thought in their sights. The end of the story, which sees the loneliness of Atlas finally relieved in 1957 by the arrival of a dog blasted into space in a Russian Sputnik, courts a kind of sheer silliness that Greek myth itself managed to avoid.

Aimed closer to the centre of the mythic canon, and much less mannered in its rhetoric, is Atwood's Penelopiad, a version of the Odyssey story from Penelope's side. It concentrates on the horrible killing told in The Odyssey of 12 slave-girls, believed to have consorted with the suitors. For Atwood, these girls had been complicit in Penelope's plot to outwit the men, and their speedy dispatch by the returning Odysseus points to their status as a mythic underclass - of peasants, slaves and servant girls - which our favourite heroic tales are happy to trample on or (at best) ignore. "We had no voice / we had no name / we had no choice ..." as their final chorus puts it.

Atwood takes Penelope's part with tremendous verve. She reveals Helen as a heartless bimbo trading on her looks, and she vividly recaptures the tensions of domestic Ithaca (dealing with Odysseus' ex-nanny proves predictably more of a problem than Homer ever let on). There are delights, too, for classical "insiders": the debate, for example, about whether Penelope and Odysseus are to set up house in the bride's or the groom's home turns into a neat joke about changes in prehistoric Greek marriage practice. But more than this - and here Atwood is far ahead of Winterson - she explores, through the figures of Odysseus and Penelope, the very nature of mythic story-telling. When Odysseus is such a renowned liar, how is Penelope to understand what he tells her on his return from his wanderings? Can you know something to be untrue and still "believe" it?

The only blot on this brilliant book is a chapter entitled "An Anthropology Lecture". This insists, through the mouth of the murdered maids, that deep beneath the story of Penelope lies the cult of the Mother Goddess, and that anyone who does not accept the matriarchal substrate of Greek myth has not learned the lessons of feminism. This is complete rubbish (most feminists I know think that matriarchy is itself a myth invented by patriarchal culture). But I suspect that Robert Graves has a lot to answer for here.

Graves was one of the few people who believed Butler's claims about the authoress of the Odyssey, and his bonkers White Goddess is a founding tract of New Age matriarchy. More influential, though, is his Greek Myths, which has been the standard reference work for half a century now (and is acknowledged by Atwood as a "crucial" source). The success of this book is a mystery; it is dry and dense, with almost as much footnote as text over its 800 pages. It is hard not to suspect that most buyers, attracted by the combination of famous author and authoritative title, do not get very far in actually reading it. But you need to skim only a few pages of the introduction to get the clear message that the Great Mother is the key to most of what will follow.

This raises the question of how to tell the orthodox versions of the Greek myths. Reworkings and subversions of the classic tales are one thing; but what if you want the stories "straight"? This has never proved too hard for a junior audience. Roger Lancelyn Green's tales of Greek gods and heroes have been serving generations of children even longer than Graves; and he has a distinguished range of modern competitors, such as Adèle Geras, whose own Penelope story, Ithaka, has just appeared (though even she chooses to spice up the tale with a dalliance between Penelope and the nicest suitor).

The adult audience is a different matter. There has been a series of brave attempts (my own favourite is by the French Hellenist Jean-Pierre Vernant, translated as The Universe, The Gods and Mortals), but none has succeeded in unseating the unreadable Graves. The latest in the line of pretenders is Nigel Spivey's Songs on Bronze. Spivey is an accomplished writer and a professional classicist, but these stories have defeated even him. It is not so much the narrative as the rhetorical register. The book is an awkward mixture of contemporary street talk and occasional mythic sententiousness - with tinges of the Just So Stories in the background. Why the problem?

Ultimately the answer lies in the nature of the myths and the very idea of an orthodox version. Except for dull encyclopedias and stories told on grandmothers' knees, there was no such thing as a "straight" version of Greek myth, even in antiquity (as Vernant astutely recognises in posing as a grandfatherly narrator). Every literary telling we have is already a reworking, a prequel, a sequel or a subversion, which then (as so clearly with The Iliad and The Odyssey) becomes ripe for reworking itself. The difficulty for us in telling the stories "straight" is that it amounts to reconstructing a narrative which never really existed, directly against the grain of the mythic culture of Greece. No wonder the rhetorical register is so hard to find, the lapses into footnotes or sententiousness so easy. Paradoxically, the jokes, cunning replotting and smart updating by the likes of Atwood and Winterson are the closest we get to the original orthodoxy of Greek myth.

· Mary Beard is a fellow of Newnham College, Cambridge. To order Helen of Troy for £18, Weight for £11, The Penelopiad for £11 or Songs on Bronze for £15.99, all with free UK p&p, call Guardian book service on 0870 836 0875.