In my Greco-Fiction project, I have briefly set aside The King Must Die in order to re-read Till We Have Faces. I have to read TWHF for a book club, but I can’t complain, really, because I was one who convinced the book club to read it for our February discussion.
If you have never heard of it, Till We Have Faces is one of C.S. Lewis’s lesser-known novels. The point of view character is a young woman, a princess in the ancient, fictional kingdom of Glome, who is cursed with an ugly face, an abusive father, and a horrible fertility goddess for a religion. Her name is Orual. The first bright spot in Orual’s life is a Greek slave her father captured in war, who becomes her tutor. The second, and much brighter, spot is her younger half-sister Psyche.
The back of the book describes it as a “timeless tale of two princesses–one beautiful and one unattractive.” Naturally, when I first picked it up, then in my late teens, I thought, “Well, I know which one of these I will identify with!” Like probably every young woman, I expected to have a grand time wallowing in self-pity on behalf of the ugly princess. However, this is not that kind of story. Orual is not envious of Psyche’s beauty. The jealousy she feels is of a very different kind.
I don’t want to give away the events of the story, because you should definitely read it. However, I do want to post a long passage from the book. This passage is very important thematically, and in terms of Orual’s character development, even though it is not an action scene.
When we topped [the ridge], and stood for a while to let the horse breathe, everything was changed. And my struggle began.
We had come into the sunlight now, too bright to look into, and warm (I threw back my cloak). Heavy dew made the grass jewel-bright. The Mountain, far greater yet also far further off than I expected, seen with the sun hanging a hand-breadth above its topmost crags, did not look like a solid thing. Between us and it was a vast tumble of valley and hill, woods and cliffs, and more little lakes than I could count. To the left and right, and behind us, the whole coloured world with all its hills was heaped up and up to the sky, with, far away, a gleam of what we call the sea. There was a lark singing; but for that, huge and ancient stillness.
And my struggle was this. You may well believe that I had set out sad enough; I came on a sad errand. Now, flung at me like frolic or insolence, there came as if it were a voice–no words–but if you made it into words it would be, “Why should your heart not dance?” It’s the measure of my folly that my heart almost answered, “Why not?” I had to tell myself over and over like a lesson the infinite reasons it had not to dance. My heart to dance? Mine whose love was taken from me, I, the ugly princess who must never look for other love, the drudge of the King, perhaps to be murdered or turned out as a beggar when my father died? And yet, it was a lesson I could hardly keep in my mind. The sight of the huge world put mad ideas into me, as if I could wander away, wander forever, see strange and beautiful things, one after the other to the world’s end. The freshness and wetness all about me made me feel that I had misjudged the world; it seemed kind, and laughing, as if its heart also danced. Even my ugliness I could not quite believe in. Who can feel ugly when the heart meets delight? It is as if, somewhere inside, within the hideous face and bony limbs, one is soft, fresh, lissom and desirable.
Was I not right to struggle against this fool-happy mood? What woman can have patience with the man who can be yet again deceived by his doxy’s fawning after he has thrice proved her false? I should be just like such a man if a mere burst of fair weather, and fresh grass after a long drought, and health after sickness, could make me friends again with this god-haunted, plague-breeding, decaying, tyrannous world.
As part of my ongoing, yearlong foray into fiction set in the ancient Mediterranean, I am now re-reading Mary Renault’s The King Must Die. There is so much history and speculation packed into this book, that I make free to do a series of posts on different topics from it, en route to the final book review. So, buckle up! I hope you like ancient historical fiction! (And, since you are visiting Out of Babel Books, I assume you at least don’t hate it!) Today’s topic is Renault’s theme of the two conflicting cultures of Hellenes vs. what they call the “Shore People.”
On the timing of the Theseus story
I have always had the impression that the story of Theseus was one of the older historical myths. It happens when Knossos, on Crete, is still a thriving city. So, in my mind, I put it a few generations before the Iliad. Madeline Miller, author of Circe, seems to agree. In her book, Circe hears of Theseus having killed the Minotaur well before Odysseus comes to land on her island.
If you do the math, Theseus living before the Odyssey would also put him living before Agamemnon returns from the war at Troy and is slaughtered in his bath by his wife, Clytemnestra. In the play Agamemnon (written, of course, much later), Clytemnestra kills her husband in revenge for his having sacrificed their thirteen-year-old daughter before he sailed for Troy, in addition to a couple of other grudges. Like most women, I find it hard not to think Clytemnestra has a case.
Renault, however, takes a different tack. She has a teenaged Theseus hear the following story from a bard:
The song he gave us was the Lay of Mycenae: how Agamemnon the first High King took the land from the Shore Folk, and married their Queen. But while he was at war she brought back the old religion, and chose another king; and when her lord came home she sacrificed him, though he had not consented. Their son, who had been hidden by the Hellenes, came back when he was a man, to restore the Sky Gods’ worship and avenge the dead. But in his blood was the old religion, to which nothing is holier than a mother. So, when he had done justice, horror sent him mad, and the Night’s Daughters chased him half over the world.
ibid, p. 40 in my copy
So here we have Agamemnon, Clytemnestra, their son Orestes, and the Furies. At the same time, this passage raises some questions.
The Shore People and Their Appearance
The Shore People make their appearance on the very first page of The King Must Die.
Our house is Hellene, sprung from the seed of Ever-Living Zeus. We worship the Sky Gods before Mother Dia and the gods of the earth. And we have never mixed our blood with the blood of the Shore People, who had the land before us.
-ibid, p. 1
As the story progresses, it rapidly becomes obvious that the Hellenes have, in fact, mixed their blood with the blood of the Shore People. There is the story of Agamemnon, above; Theseus is said to be “blonde and blue-eyed like the Hellenes, but small and wiry like the Shore People,” and Theseus, who is very promiscuous, even has a child who “came out small and dark, but so was [his mother’s] brother.”
So we have two populations, one that is native to the Greek coastlands (or at least has been there a long time), and one that came there from the steppes. Theseus’s grandfather explains to him their ethnic history, which he got from his own grandfather:
“Long ago, he said, our people lived in the northland, beyond Olympos. He said, and he was angry when I doubted it, that they never saw the sea. Instead of water they had a sea of grass, which stretched as far as the swallow flies, from the rising to the setting sun. They lived by the increase of their herds, and built no cities; when the grass was eaten, they moved where there was more. … When they journeyed, the barons in their chariots rode round about, guarding the flocks and the women … [Lord Poseidon] told the King Horse, and the King Horse led them. When they needed new pastures, they let him loose; and he, taking care of the people as the god advised him, would smell the air seeking food and water. The barons followed him, to give battle if his passage was disputed; but only the god told him where to go.”
ibid, pp. 16 – 17
This is a description of the Indo-European lifestyle and homeland. The Indo-Europeans took their reverence for the horse, and their wheeled carts and chariots, with them wherever they went, including to Scandinavia. So the Hellenes are Indo-European, and the Shore People, presumably, Hamitic or Semitic.
The mask at the top of this post is Mycenaean. Mycenae is located in the Peloponnesian Peninsula, which is also the location of Troizen, Theseus’s home. The ancient Mycenaean culture, older than classical Greece, took its cues from the Cretan urban culture of the time. In later Greece, you get men wearing himations and women wearing finely woven chitons. This is usually how Helen of Troy, for example, is illustrated. However, she probably looked more like the Mycenaean and Cretan women. Here is someone’s attempt to reconstruct the probable hairstyle and costume of the most beautiful woman in the world:
Notice the Egyptian-style, kohl-lined eyes, and the red suns for makeup. Helen might have been blonde, being a Hellene, but her clothing was perhaps more like this.
Here is someone else, reconstructing a traditional Mycenean costume and pose:
I’m guessing these fashion choices came from the Shore People.
Theseus’s mother is described as wearing this ancient Mycenaean style. She wears a tiered, flounced skirt hung with charms, exposed breasts (what was going on, Crete and Mycenae?) and hair that is curled by the use of “crimping braids” (probably to attain a very curly look for those who do not, like the Shore People, have it naturally). Though a blonde Hellene, she is a priestess of the mother goddess, and so she takes some of her cues from the Shore People, and here is where we find the tension.
The Shore People and Their Religion
Both the Hellenes and the Shore People practice the sacrifice of their kings. However, there is a difference. For the Hellenes, it does not come on a regular schedule. Theseus’s grandfather explains:
“When the work of the King Horse was done, he was given to the god … And in those days, said my great-grandfather, as with the King Horse, so with the King. When the king was dedicated, he knew his moira [i.e. doom]. In three years, or seven, or nine, or whenever the custom was, his term would end and the god would call him. And he went consenting, or else he was no king, and no power would fall on him to lead the people. And the custom changes, Theseus, but the token never. … Later the custom altered. They ceased to offer the King at a set time. They kept him for the extreme sacrifice … And it was no one’s place to say to him, ‘It is time to make the offering.’ He was the nearest to the god, because he had consented to his moira; and he himself received the god’s commandment. And so it is still, Theseus. We know our time. … It is not the sacrifice … it is not the bloodletting that calls down power. It is the consenting, Theseus. The readiness is all.”
ibid. pp. 18 – 19
This might explain why so many kurgan burials are of high-born individuals who seem not to have died of old age.
It also, of course, explains the title of the book.
Meanwhile, it has been established that the Shore People do things a different way: “old laments have come down from the Shore People, of young heroes who love a goddess for a year, and foreknow their deaths” (p. 37). In other words, the Shore People treat their king primarily as the goddess or priestess’s consort, and kill him after just a year.
Marija Gimbutas has tried to make the case that the Shore People practiced a gentle, feminine, goddess-worshipping religion, and that they were cruelly exterminated by the warlike, sky-god worshipping evil Indo-Europeans. Renault is not going to paint with such a broad brush. Realistically, she shows both groups living next to one another and influencing each other. Also, throughout the course of the story, she is going to show by increasingly vivid illustrations that these two cultural systems are absolutely incompatible with each other. And that the mother-worship, in the end, is at least as bloody as the worship of Zeus.
Renault’s take on the story of Agamemnon is a great illustration of this. She interprets the story as a conflict between Clytemnestra’s mother-goddess culture and Agamemnon’s sky-father culture. When Clytemnestra brings back the “old religion,” it means that Agamemnon must die–not in battle, not some day, but now, and actually, yesterday. It means that Orestes is doubly cursed. He has loyalty to both religions, with their incompatible demands, and he is put at the mercy of the furies, the representatives of the goddess-religion. They chase him because he killed his mother, but if we string out the implications, even if he had not, they would probably be chasing him anyway. After all, he is a male heir to the throne, so his days are definitely numbered. Behold, the kindness of the religion of the goddess.
Obviously, there are some universal truths and some redemptive metaphors here, hidden under a thick layer of occultism, war between the sexes, and general pain and suffering for everyone. It is going to take a much greater King than Theseus to cut this difficult knot.
Seasonal Postscript
Oh, and Happy Valentine’s Day to everyone! Such a romantic post, I realize.
This year, I decided that my fiction focus would be novels inspired by ancient Greek myths. I don’t always pick a fiction focus, but this year, things just coalesced.
In the classical Christian school where I teach, we follow a 4-year “history cycle.” Ancient World, Medieval World, Exploration/Renaissance, Modern World. This year, we are cycling through Ancient, so I have been immersed in the Flood, the Sumerians, Abraham, Egypt, and the Iliad and Odyssey. (Somewhat immersed, of course. We could always immerse ourselves more.)
Revisiting Mycenae and Crete, I remembered that back in university (in the last millennium!) I read what I thought was a fantastic book that was a re-telling of Theseus. Looked it up, and it turns out it was The King Must Die by Mary Renault. And it turns out that Renault has a bunch of other books that I’ve never read. (Back in the last millennium, the way we found books was we stumbled upon them in the library.) So, onto the list went at least a re-read of The King Must Die and its sequel, The Bull from the Sea. I bought myself copies of these for Christmas using my husband’s money, so technically he bought me the copies for Christmas.
Meanwhile, years ago I had won a copy of Circe, and had been waiting to read it until I was ready to stick my head back in the ancient Mediterranean. I’m also aware that Madeline Miller has at least one more book, The Song of Achilles, which is from Patroclos’s point of view. Gay, of course (and that is historically accurate). I decided I might read that, depending upon how I enjoyed or didn’t enjoy Circe. You can write about ancient Greek events from a hard-core feminist/queer perspective, or you can not. I wanted to know first what approach Miller was taking.
Finally, some of my students have been reading Percy Jackson, with the result that they are already quite familiar with the Greek pantheon. I’d known that the Jackson books were out there, so perhaps now is the year when I read at least a few of them. Jackson went onto the list.
Then there are the rereads. Til We Have Faces is C.S. Lewis’s masterpiece, set probably in Scythia or the Caucasus, near the Greeks but not too near. Moving farther from Greece, we have Taliesin, Merlin, and Arthur by Steven R. Lawhead. I read Taliesin in high school. It’s Celtic, not Greek, except that about half the book takes place on Atlantis, with bull dancing and stuff, so I figure that counts. Now, the Daily Wire has made a TV series based on these books. The events of Taliesin take up about an episode and a half. So, if I have time, I’ll reread/read Steven R. Lawhead.
So, here is the list as it stands …
Circe
The Song of Achilles?
The King Must Die
The Bull from the Sea
other books by Renault?
Til We Have Faces
at least a couple of Percy Jackson books
Taliesin
Merlin?
Arthur?
This should fulfill the twelve books that I told Goodreads I’m planning on, this year.
In the course of my teaching year, I have already read The Cat of Bubastes with my students, and am now reading Hittite Warrior, which is also very good. Also on the docket is The Young Carthaginian.
So, how was Circe?
I loved this book. It is exactly the genre I like. Miller did a fantastic job keeping track of all the gods, titans, and nymphs, their little feuds, and their family relations to one another.
Circe, in The Odyssey, is a “witch” whom Odysseus and his men encounter on the island of Aiaia (Corsica or Sardinia … I was imagining Corsica). She turns some of them into pigs, but Odysseus convinces her to change them back. She becomes a sort of ambiguous ally, giving him advice about how to handle the Moving Rocks, the Sirens, and Charybdis and Scylla.
Of course, there is always more detail to the story. Miller has researched this deeply, and I appreciate her portrait of where Circe came from. Circe is the daughter of the sun, Helios, who is a titan, and his one legitimate wife. This makes her the sister of Pasiphaë, wife of King Minos (ahem), and also of Aeetes, father of the witch Madea.
Given that she is divine, Circe gets a front-row seat to nearly all the earliest myths. She meets Prometheus in person. She watches the whole ugly episode with Minotaur go down (this is centuries before Odysseus). Time passes quickly for her. At the same time, she is sort of fascinated by mortals. On the plus side, this means she does not view them as disposable, as most of her relatives do. On the down side, she at first fails to see them as a threat.
Near the end of the book, she has this to say.
I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.
p. 385
Though a page-turner, Circe was a heavy read emotionally. As you might expect, it really stinks to be an ancient Greek god or Titan. You are likely to have horrible parents, for example. The hardest part for me was finding out what we might have suspected by reading between the lines: that Odysseus was actually a real [censored], and that things did not go happily after he made it home to Ithaka. Thankfully, Miller does not leave us there but introduces at least one good man and gives the book’s ending a faint note of redemption.
Based on this read, I think I will try The Song of Achilles if I come across it. Miller’s writing is not ideological. It is extremely tragic, with heartbreaking near misses and so forth, but that is actually how these ancient stories go.
Out of Babel Books 
