I can offer no other explanation: I close my eyes and travel. The ancient Mediterranean worlds of the tales I write lie some 9,600 kilometers from my writing desk in Rio de Janeiro, and yet, in the solitude of the working hours—the cell phone on mute, the tropical city going about its business beyond the […]
Rio de Janeiro and the Bronze Age: Writing Ancient Worlds from a Modern City Read More »
I. Introduction The religion of the Late Bronze Age Aegean was not Olympian religion in an earlier form. It was something older and stranger: more local, more animistic, more deeply rooted in the agricultural rhythms of the land and the intimate realities of the household. The defined personalities we know from Homer, of gods with
The Forgotten Gods of Bronze Age Greece Read More »
I confess that as a child I believed the following tales were the stories of real people who had lived long ago. Only when I got older did I understand their significance as myths, though at times I am not entirely sure. The details seem too specific, too human, too particular to be pure invention.
Myths That Have Haunted Me Since Youth Read More »
This is a fascinating question precisely because it touches the murky frontier between Mycenaean religion, Arcadian local cults, and the Olympian mythology that the Greeks of the Archaic and later periods projected backward into the Bronze Age. The short answer is that Athána Alēa is not an Olympian Athena at all. She appears to preserve
Who Is Athána Alēa in Atalanta of the Wild? Read More »
In the world of Atalanta of the Wild, worthy men do not simply walk into a king’s megaron. They are announced. A court herald strikes his staff upon the stone floor, and the name, lineage, and fame of the arriving hero ring out across the hall before the man himself has taken three steps into
PART TWO | The Heroes at the Gate: Assembling the Hunters of Khalydōn Read More »
Every novelist who works with ancient mythology eventually arrives at the same uncomfortable discovery: the sources disagree, they fall silent, or they compress into a few lines of poetry what would have taken days or weeks of human effort to accomplish. The Calydonian Boar Hunt presented me with those three problems, and the most instructive
On Ovid, Myth, and Historical Imagination There is a question every novelist must answer, if only to themselves: why this story, and why now? For me the answer arrived not gradually but all at once, in the final lines of a myth I had known for years without truly seeing. Ovid tells Atalanta‘s story across
Why a Novel About Atalanta? Read More »
