Book Four
Literary Mythology
The Amazon's End
The Tragedy of Penthesilea
The war had been running for ten years when Penthesilea, War-Queen of the Amazons, brought her twelve best warriors to the walls of Troy. She came because she owed a blood-debt. She came because she believed in something. She came because she was the last great queen of a people the world was in the process of forgetting, and this was the last great war, and there would not be another opportunity like it.
The Greeks had Achilles. Troy had its walls. Penthesilea had twelve women and a cause that history would later struggle to remember clearly. The narrator has opinions about this.
Drawing on the Aethiopis of Arctinus of Miletus and Quintus of Smyrna's Posthomerica, The Amazon's End follows Penthesilea from Themiscyra to the Scaean Gate in the voice that has carried this series from the beginning — present, wry, and constitutionally unable to let a legend pass without noting what the poets left out.
"She came to Troy to die well. History would decide whether she had managed it."
Book Three
Literary Mythology
The Hound of Troy
The Vengeance of Hecuba
Hecuba was fifty-two years old, Queen of Troy, mother of fifty children, and the most competent person in any room she entered. Then the war ended, and everything she had built — and everyone she had loved — was taken from her in the space of a single night.
What the myth remembers is what came after: the discovery of her youngest son's body on a Thracian shore, the vengeance in the tent, the blinding of a king, and the transformation on the headland at Cynossema — the place that the sailors would call the Dog's Tomb for centuries after, without knowing why. The Hound of Troy is an account of how a woman who never showed emotion in public arrived at the point where there was nothing left to show.
"From supreme queen to slave. They took everything, so she took their eyes."
Book Two
Literary Mythology
Hercules and the Cradle of Thunder
The myth of Heracles is the most famous in the Greek canon, which is precisely why it needs to be read carefully. The twelve labours are well known. What is less well known is what the labours were for — and what it costs a man to be remade, task by task, into the thing a god requires.
Hercules and the Cradle of Thunder follows the greatest hero of the ancient world from Thebes to the pyre on Mount Oeta, in a voice that has no particular interest in celebrating the legend at the expense of the person inside it.
Book One
Literary Mythology
The Fall from Heaven
The Myth of Bellerophon and Pegasus
Bellerophon tamed Pegasus, killed the Chimera, survived the Amazons, and defeated the Solymi — and then, at the height of his fame, attempted to ride a winged horse to Mount Olympus to take his place among the gods. The gods were not expecting him. They were also not pleased.
The myth of Bellerophon is the myth of the overreacher — the man who won everything and lost it by wanting more. The Fall from Heaven is its retelling: a story about the distance between what the gods promise and what they deliver, and about what Corinth looked like from the perspective of a man who could not stop looking up.
Where this series begins.
