On Modern Retellings: Medea and Clytemnestra

Right now, I am in the final stretch of my Gender and Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome course at Villanova University. This was a condensed summer class of 9 weeks, focusing on themes such as: sexuality and philosophy in Plato’s Symposium; archaic Greek poetry and vase paintings; women, desire, and Sappho; ancient insults surrounding masculinity (this was wild); and erotic educations in Euripides’ Hippolytus and Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe (a new favorite, and possibly the world’s first romance novel). While the course was short, we covered a lot of ground with topics that inspired me to research more (as any scholar should want to do). 

The Silence of the Girls by Pat Barker—one of my favorite retellings.

For our final project, we were asked to either write a paper or conduct a research project with a creative component. I chose the latter, mostly because I love the idea of sharing what I’m studying with others, acting as sort of a guide through my academic brain. So while this blog post exists, in part, to fulfill a course requirement, it’s also a starting point for me to do more blogs like this in the future.

Even before I started at Villanova, I was fascinated with Greek mythology and retellings. They have become increasingly more popular, and will likely become even more popular with the release of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. Women-centered retellings in particular are having their moment, including Madeline Miller’s Circe and Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls (both great starting points if you’re interested in the genre).

I was also obsessed with Euripides’ Medea and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, featuring Clytemnestra. Both main characters are women and murderers, stepping outside of the traditional gender roles of ancient Greece. Medea and Clytemnestra have also been written and interpreted by numerous authors, including Homer, Seneca, and Pindar, to name a few. The art of retelling is nothing new.

This interest in retellings and characters, and the discussions and research in class, led me to my project thesis: How do the portrayals of Medea and Clytemnestra exemplify the various positions of gender roles and expectations in ancient times, and why are contemporary retellings focused on recentering and reimagining these women through a more feminist lens?

Research for me is always the hardest part of a paper. Sometimes there is so much out there about a given topic that it can be difficult to wade through all the texts to find exactly what you are looking for. Sometimes it can be hard to find what you’re looking for because there isn’t an abundance of scholarship that aligns with your thesis—which can be a good thing if you are looking to publish your research. 

For my topic, I was hashtag blessed to find more research than I expected. I knew I needed to cover both the historical context of gender in ancient Greece (this was plentiful in articles, thanks to more modern scholars) and the positioning of contemporary retellings by women (not plentiful, but strangely enough in the exact characters I was writing on). 

I started my research on the historical position of women. While all the texts I found touched on this in some way, the two I used the most for context were:

• Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classic Antiquity by Sarah B. Pomeroy

• Woman, Tyrant, Mother, Murderess: An Exploration of the Mythic Character of Clytemnestra in All Her Forms by Rachel M.E. Wolfe

In Pomeroy’s book, I focused on the Introduction as well as chapter 6, “Images of Women in the Literature of Classical Athens.” Pomeroy discusses the different ways we attempt to find information about the lives of ancient women where what we have are mostly stories written by men, as well as fragments of other texts, vases, graffiti, and other archeological evidence. We do not have a full picture. In chapter 6, they then go into the portrayal of women in Greek tragedies and comedy, and how the former may be a better example of real women in ancient Greece since comedies are more focused on the average person rather than grand characters we find in tragedies. 

Wolfe’s text uses the different iterations of Clytemnestra to show how her character embodies the way society, culturally and politically, viewed women and their expectations of women’s sociopolitical position.

Next, of course, I wanted to find scholarship on contemporary retellings about these characters. I’ve read a number of retellings on Medea, and found a paper of the exact retelling I read most recently—Eilish Quin’s Medea. Next, I found a paper on Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra, one I admittedly haven’t read yet, but it’s glaring at me from my bookshelf (I hope to get to it during the semester break). I was hesitant to use the scholarship of a book I haven’t read yet, but I figured I am not injecting my opinion of the book at all, but showing the discourse surrounding it. 

Both of these articles show how these retellings give readers a deeper understanding of the character’s traumatic past, their inner thoughts, as well as their positioning within the gender roles of their time; whereas modern readers can then make their own connections to the gender roles of our time. As Pomeroy writes in her introduction, the “story of the women of antiquity should be told now” not just for history’s sake, but “because the past illuminates contemporary problems in relationships between men and women” and how these “attitudes toward women and the roles women play in Western society have endured through the centuries.”

Finally, I wanted to pull out a bit in scope and find a text about retellings of Greek mythology in general. I’m a big fan of Jean Menzies' YouTube channel; her work actually inspired me to finally chase my dream and go back to college to study the Classics. Jean also wrote a book called All the Violet Tiaras, on queer retellings of Greek mythology. I turned to her introduction which beautifully details the why of modern retellings from a modern lens. Menzies underscores how mythology was never cut and dry; they were open to interpretation, often contradictory, and retold over again even within ancient times. Retellings, especially modern retellings, are not abnormal or somehow ruining a “pure” piece of art. Menzies quotes Bea Fitzgerald, who states that “playwrights and writers in antiquity shift narratives—in creating a queer retelling so too do modern writers, and it’s incredible that it is not only the story that connects us but the very act of writing the story that invokes the people who came millennia before us” (Introduction). Modern retellings continue the tradition of altering and passing down stories, connecting us to the past.

If you’d like to read any of the scholarship mentioned above (I recommend, especially if you have interest in gender studies and ancient Greece), please find my works cited below.  

Eiduka, Dina. "Rewriting the Myth: Costanza Casati’s Clytemnestra." Literatūra (Vilnius), vol. 67, no. 4, 2025, https://doi.org/10.15388/Litera.2025.67.4.4.

Menzies, Jean. All the Violet Tiaras: Queering the Greek Myths. Kindle Ed, Unknown Binding, 2024.

Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. Kindle Ed, Schocken Books Inc.,1995. 

Scoggins, Rachel. "Reexamining Medea's Monstrosity in Greek Mythology and Eilish Quin's Medea." Humanities (2076-0787), vol. 13, no. 6, 2024, pp. 168-188, https://doi.org/10.3390/h13060168. 

Wolfe, Rachel LM. E. "Woman, Tyrant, Mother, Murderess: An Exploration of The Mythic Character of Clytemnestra in All Her Forms." Women's Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 6, 2009, pp. 692-719, https://doi.org/10.1080/00497870903021554.

So, what do we know about women in ancient Greece? Sadly, not as much as one would want. Generally, knowledge of the everyday lives of female citizens/individuals is based on fragmented archeological finds, and fictional or documentary texts almost exclusively written by men. That isn’t to say that there weren’t more texts by women, but they haven’t been preserved or were lost over time. As a Classicist, you realize and get comfortable with the idea of not knowing, but you research and make very educated guesses to fill in the gaps.  

A woman on a classical Greek vase.

To set the stage for the next section of this blog, I am going to bullet point some understandings of gender in ancient Greece that apply to my thesis, and that I learned through scholarship in the course syllabus. Note again, that these understandings are based on what evidence we have and can interpret. 

• Women were expected to be passive, not acting on anything, including revenge, through their own hands. Revenge in particular was seen as a masculine trait.

• Women need to be contained because they leak fluids, and men are dry. (Real thought in ancient times! Google it.)

• Women who refused to be submissive were seen as dangerous, because they had the potential to dismantle a male-centered social hierarchy. A theme throughout the texts we read in class was the dichotomy of fearing women while simultaneously dismissing and disregarding them.

• Ancient Greek men, and Romans, had a fear of softness, femininity, and passivity. While sexuality was somewhat fluid, there were still hierarchies within sexuality based on who was penetrating and who was being penetrated.   

• Women were expected to be in the domestic sphere , taking care of the household while men were outside the home. That isn’t to say women did not leave the home or were not social (there were festivals dedicated to Dionysus that were largely led by women, for example), but their role was largely the domestic and maternal.

This is a very small list of gender roles; I could go on, but the above is enough to move on to the next section. To learn more, I’ve included some books in the Recommended Reads section below.

The two characters highlighted in my project are both women who seek revenge through murder. I will give you the Cliff Notes' version of the ancient texts, and then go into the interpretations in comparison to the contemporary retellings. 

In Euripides’ Medea, the titular character has been abandoned by her husband, Jason, for another woman, Glauce, daughter of King Creon. Medea and her two children are left in Corinth, where she cries out and laments on her fate. She feels abandoned and used after all she had done to help Jason obtain the Golden Fleece, including killing her own brother. To seek revenge, Medea has her children bring a crown and robe to their new step mother, Glauce. What she does not tell them is it is poisoned. When putting on the crown and robe (this does not happen on stage), Glauce dies; her father Creon, comes in to hold his daughter, and he dies as well. Back in Corinth, Medea is, like, “good,” and then she begins thinking about her children and the life they will lead when they are seen as at fault for Glauce and Creon’s deaths. She doesn’t want society to punish her children, and she also wants to punish Jason more—so she murders their children. When Jason comes home, understandably upset, Medea and Jason exchange words. Medea is then lifted to the heavens by a chariot of Helios (Greek plays just kind of … end). 

Medea About to Murder Her Children by Eugène Ferdinand Victor Delacroix, 1862

Euripides’ play, performed at a festival in 431 BC, is possibly the first version of this story where Medea kills her children; in other versions, they are killed by the people in town or by accident. We, of course, don’t know why Euripides made this choice, but it’s interesting nonetheless. It adds a wickedness and another dimension to this character, who is ostracized for being a non-Greek outsider, a woman, a mother, and a witch. There have been debates about whether or not Euripides’ play is misogynistic, that by highlighting a villainous woman he is saying something about all women, but again, we can’t know. I do, however, agree with Pomeroy in her text: “I can scarcely believe that so subtle a dramatist as Euripides, who called into question traditional Athenian beliefs and prejudices surrounding foreigners, war, and the Olympian gods, would have intended his audience simply to accept the misogynistic maxims. Rather, he uses the extreme vantage point of misogyny as a means of examining popular beliefs about women” (Chapter 6). By simply centering a villainous woman, that does not necessarily mean he is being overtly misogynistic: he gives her depth (as much as you can in a play), he elicits sympathy for her situation, and he gives reasons for her actions. Of course, for both an ancient and modern audience, filicide is beyond excusable. Ancient Greeks believed a woman’s role is to be a mother, so filicide at the hands of a woman is a horrifying prospect. Today, too, obviously, but for ancient Greeks, there was a deeper horror tied specifically to gender roles and expectations of being a wife and mother. These plays are not true stories, so it is definitely saying something about gender roles for an audience in a political/social context. Not only is Medea acting in a masculine way by enacting revenge, she is going outside her role by killing her children. Medea is the dangerous woman who must be contained, though Euripides seems to imply that her actions are sanctioned by the Gods (who are no strangers to filicide) when Helios’ chariot whisks her away.  

In her 2024 retelling (there will be spoilers ahead), aptly titled Medea, Eilish Quin provides a deeper backstory for Medea, from her upbringing under a cruel father, sexual violence, and feeling ostracized from the women in her family who conform to gender expectations and behavior. Unlike Euripides’ Medea, Quin’s Medea does not want to be a wife, and her main positive relationship is with her brother, who she has sworn to protect (a shift from expected gender roles). In this text, she kills her brother, quite horrifically, but stitches him together and brings him back to life (her magical abilities here include necromancy). She also kills her children with the same intention to bring them back to life, but it doesn’t work. By giving Medea a deeper backstory, and different reasons and outcomes for the murders, we are able to position her character not as a villain, but as a deeply misunderstood woman ostracized and hindered by a patriarchal society taking her life in her own hands. Whether or not this makes the character in Quin’s text less complex and thus less interesting is something the reader can decide. 

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, written in the fifth century BC, is the first part of a trilogy of plays called the Oresteia, and takes place after the Trojan War when Agamemnon comes home to his wife, Clytemnestra, who has been managing the household in his stead. But Agamemnon doesn’t just come home by himself; he has Cassandra with him, a seer who he has taken as his slave. (You may know Cassandra as Paris’ sister.) Clytemnestra is big mad because Agamemnon had killed their daughter, Iphigenia, as a sacrifice to Artemis to give them wind in their sails for the Trojan war. She plots to kill her husband and Cassandra by her own hands. She does, and stands bloody over their dead bodies at the end. 

Clytemnestra by John Collier, 1882

Clytemnestra has also taken a lover while her husband was away—so not only does she step out of her gender role by running the household and killing Agamemnon, but she’s also stepped outside her duty as a wife. In other ancient texts of Clytemnestra, her unfaithfulness is her biggest charge. And in other texts, her revenge for Iphigenia is not even part of the story. Aeschylus, I think, gives Clytemnestra more of a reason to kill her husband (I think many mothers today would find no fault to her action, to avenge a daughter’s death), and gives her a role that is definitely meant to be interpreted as masculine. To a modern audience, this may seem as a positive depiction of her character, but one could also view this as a tale of warning: if women have control, there will be consequences. When Clytemnestra takes revenge in her own hands, when she does not adhere to Agamemnon’s control, and when she becomes head of household, she dismantles a gendered hierarchy that threatens society. 

Similar to Quin’s book, Casati’s retelling of Clytemnestra gives a deeper backstory to the title character. We see her grow up, learn to fight on the battlefield, and live under an oppressive father. When Agamemnon is introduced, he exerts violence over her and her previous family, killing her child and then forcing himself on her. What Casati does, as Eiduka explains in her scholarship, is center Clytemnestra’s role as a mother as “a source of individual power and agency that exists independently of the institution of marriage and beyond the control of the husband. [For Clytemnestra,] motherhood becomes an act of self-definition: through her children, she reclaims ownership of her body, emotions, and destiny, transforming what patriarchy views as a domestic duty into a form of resistance and moral autonomy” (53). In her book, Casati takes the warnings that Aeschylus offered of a woman in power, and flipped it on its head. Her masculine role is not a danger to society; her masculine role is what led her to become a powerful woman, one who would fiercely defend her children, and avenge their deaths. This masculine role is positioned as a trait to be honored, not feared.

Why do retellings matter in literature? What keeps us coming back to these stories again and again? I would argue that we are simply continuing the tradition of storytelling, where we alter stories to align with a contemporary setting. As we know, retellings are not anything new, and ancient creatives did this all the time, shifting narratives that reflect the sociopolitical climates following war, disease, democracy, and disasters. Ancient Greece was also vast, with different peoples from different locations who all had their way of understanding and navigating societal roles. Storytelling naturally evolves. So why would contemporary times be any different?

Library of Alexandria by O. Von Corven, ~1800s

I want to re-up when Bea Fitzgerald states, “it’s incredible that it is not only the [stories] that [connect] us but the very act of writing the story that invokes the people who came millennia before us.” I think that is the other component of this—by harkening back to women in mythical antiquity and retelling their stories, we are connecting ourselves to that history and becoming a part of it. We can reshape these fascinating characters to bring them to a new audience.

Mythology and an interest in ancient history has persisted because it tells us, as a human race, who we were, who we are, and who we can be. Plainly put, we learn about the trajectory of the human race. And this is not just ancient Greece, or Rome, but all mythology and history. We are only who we are now because of who we used to be.  

If you’d like to explore women in antiquity more (I’m including Rome here too), or want recommendations for retellings, don’t worry—I’ve got you covered.

Books:

• Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classic Antiquity by Sarah B. Pomeroy

• Fulvia: The Woman Who Broke All the Rules in Ancient Rome by Jane Draycott

• Pandora's Jar: Women in the Greek Myths by Natalie Haynes

• A Rome of One's Own: The Forgotten Women of the Roman Empire by Emma Southon

• A Thousand Ships by Natalie Haynes (okay, so anything by Natalie Haynes)

• Hekate by Nikita Gill

• This Restless House by Zinnie Faber

• Pompeii by Robert Harris 

Websites/blogs:

• The Medusa Archive

• The Thesmophoria: Women's Ritual in the Ancient World

• Women in Antiquity

Videos/YouTube:

• Jean’s Thoughts

• The Center for Hellenic Studies

• Lady of the Library