The Hellenist is a geek (or a geekette) like the others: to study the vestiges of Antiquity is of course first of all to discuss the texts and compare the versions, but also (an important part of the pleasure) to find characters recurring ones, note their attributes, follow their escapades, classify them and prefer some of them. In Free like a Greek goddess, Laure de Chantal, normalien, aggregated in classics, brings out her game of powerful female figures from mythology – goddesses or heroines – and share the fun. In the draw, almost all of them are famous and placed in eloquent categories: “the warriors”, “the scholars”, “the queens”… Parade Ariadne, Antigone, Penelope, Medea or Athena. If the cast is so sturdy, it’s because it’s less about making discoveries than rehabilitating some of them, sometimes badly perceived, badly received. For that, nothing better than to go back to the root of the words. Virgo, Artemis the huntress? Translation-traitor: «parthenos, “Virgin”, in ancient times, does not mean not having a sexual and loving life, but it means remaining free and not getting married” – Diana of the Romans would rather be “single”, without, moreover, prohibiting either men or women. And the terrible Circe? Especially a loner “more a scientist than a witch”. As for Aphrodite, placed at the end of the procession, she appears “dominant, triumphant, free”, she whom the late performances froze a little quickly in “beautiful idiot” on its shell.
A lesson in “freedom”, “choice, words, deeds”
With its pop cover and casual style (the footnote is used sparingly), Free like a Greek goddess is part, form and content, in a dynamic of popularization for practical use: a lesson in “freedom” (“of choice, words, deeds”) dispensed by the Ancients, freedom which remains “for us always to conquer”. Thus the author draws her astonishment and anger from the extreme contemporary, from Florence Foresti to Maria Casarès via Wonder Woman. Lived experience is here and there another support, a way of abolishing in the blink of an eye the teacher-student distance as well as that of Antiquity with the present of reading. It is not necessarily the most necessary for the demonstration, the stories and their fortune sufficient to capture attention. That of Baucis and Philemon speaks volumes: told by Ovid in Book VIII of the Metamorphoses, it depicts Jupiter and Mercury traveling in Phrygia, starving and welcomed by a robust old woman (Baucis) and her husband (Philemon) to supper like kings – to thank them, the gods grant them not to see each other die , changing them to linden and oak. In the 17th century, Jean de La Fontaine made a fable of it, “Philemon and Baucis”, which relegates the woman to the background and transforms this force of nature into a submissive wife. Let us restore the myth to its initial meaning, argues Laure de Chantal’s essay, and recall Ovid, “poet of which it will be necessary to recognize one day that he is a feminist”.