Similarly, myths that deal with a change of sex are proving intriguing today, notwithstanding the fact that stories like that of the prophet Tiresias (who turned into a woman for several years) and Caenis/Caeneus (who asked to become a man after she was raped by the god Neptune), often need to be read against the text if they are to be seen as affirming of trans experience. What mattered was that there were different ways of thinking about love other than those they had been told were right and natural, and that the source of these different ways of thinking was the classical world, with its immense cultural capital. It mattered little that the social context in which desire operated in classical Athens was a world away from theirs.

In the 19th century, gay men often saw themselves reflected in Greek literature. Nevertheless, as Morales writes, creative readings, even misreadings, of classical texts and stories can be immensely generative. So much for lazy parallel-making, for placing complex actions into a constricting classical frame. “She said nothing but gave me a long look of unmitigated contempt.” When she met Gbowee, Morales asked her what she thought about the play and the comparisons made in the press. Framing the Liberian women’s protest in terms of Aristophanes is, Morales argues, unhelpful – “a distorting mirror that reduces women to bodies and complex political action to titillation”. In fact, as the Nobel laureate pointed out in her memoir, quoted here by Morales: “The truth is that the greatest weapons of the Liberian women’s movement were moral clarity, persistence and patience.” The sex strike, though attention grabbing, formed a tiny part of the struggle. Activist Leymah Gbowee was labelled the “Liberian Lysistrata” after the western press picked up on the fact that the women’s movement in Liberia had staged such a strike in its efforts to end the civil war in 2002. Lysistrata, performed by a male cast to a (probably) largely male audience, is a comedic fantasy, not a feminist call to armsīut the play, performed by a male cast to a (probably) largely male audience is a comedic fantasy, not a feminist call to arms. This idea is often identified as deriving from Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata, in which the women of war-plagued Greece decide to withhold sex from their men until peace is established.

One passage, for example, deals with the sex strike as a tool of resistance. Morales does not write only about stories from mythology as such, but also about the myths the modern world has created from classical texts. The subtitle is “The Subversive Power of the Ancient Myths”.

Antigone rising helen morales