Circe – Madeline Miller

Every now and again I am asked to explain what relevance an education in the classics, by which I mean Roman and Greek culture and literature, may possibly have in the 21^st century, bizarrely, perhaps, the latest being the rather desperate Classics faculty at Cambridge. It is easy to be flippant – the ability to think logically, crack problems, complete cryptic crosswords, logophilia – but the well of mythology is so deep, rich and so embedded in the fabric of Western thought and its literature, that it would be a crying shame if they were let go by default.

Part of the drive to give the classics modern relevance is to focus on and indeed boost the role of Women. In my day, the diet was an unremitting one of men and gods. The number of women I encountered in my studies could be counted on the fingers of a rather cack-handed carpenter and they were mostly divinities. Women played a bit part, decorative, supportive, occasionally mad, bad and dangerous. But they were definitely second class citizens, just a notch above the slaves on the social scale.

It is hard other than to see Miller’s enjoyable novel, Circe, as part of this trend to assert the role of women. As Circe herself says at one point, “humbling women seems to be the chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and creep.” The fight back starts here. But in Homer’s Odyssey, Circe only plays a bit part, delaying Odysseus and his men by seducing the former and turning the latter into pigs and then within a few lines of the epic, they are all set free. Pretty thin gruel upon which to build a feast, you would, think, but one of Circe’s qualities is that she is well-connected.

The spinning wheel made by Daedalus looms large in Miller’s tale, used initially by Circe herself and then Penelope. By extension, as if she was weaving a garment, Miller creates a seamless tale intertwining the myths of some of Circe’s multitudinous family. So in her pages we meet Aeetes, Circe’s brother and keeper of the Golden Fleece – cue Jason – Pasiphae, her sister, wife of King Minos and mother of the Minotaur – cue Theseus – and Medea, Circe’s niece, Jason’s bride and killer of her brother, Absyrtus.

Exiled to a deserted island, Aiaia, for transforming her rival Scylla into a twelve-legged sailor-gobbling monster, Circe fills her time by developing her talents as a sorceress and taking on a string of paramours – Hermes, Daedalus, Odysseus (natch) and Telemachus, the itinerant hero’s son by Penelope. Miller draws from sources as disparate as Ovid, Homer and the lost epic, the Telegony, to create a finale where her son, Telegonus, by Odysseus, unwittingly fulfils Teiresias’ prophecy by being instrumental in his father’s death. The grief-stricken son brings Telemachus and Penelope to Aiaia where Telemachus and Circe hook up and Telegonus, at the goddess Athena’s prompting, leaves to found cities in Italy.

But the book’s key encounter occurs early on, when Circe meets Prometheus who is taken to Helios’ court to be flogged as a precursor to his more famous and eternal punishment. It is here that Circe learns about mortals, a subject which fascinates her, and as Miller’s tale unfolds we learn that the disdain in which Circe is held by her family is in part attributable to her voice, “thin sound”, that of a mortal. Circe’s peregrinations through Greek mythology are fuelled by her desire to understand mortals.

Miller has crafted a romp of a book. I found it less successful than her earlier The Song of Achilles but she has successfully transformed a Homeric bit player into a woman who knows her mind and is in control of her destiny. If you are looking for the relevance of classics today, you need look no further to the wealth of stories to be found in Greek mythology, each of which is capable of being crafted and transformed to meet the zeitgeist.